Working with OLEDs: SSD1353 & SSD1333

A quick intro to interfacing common OLED displays to bare-metal microcontrollers.

A pet peeve of mine is that when it comes to microcontroller projects, good displays seem taboo. Consider Microsoft’s MakeCode Arcade: a laudable corporate effort to get kids interested in game design by letting them build software in a Scratch-like environment and then deploy apps to handheld consoles.

An example of this hardware is Adafruit PyGamer. The specs are impressive for the price: it sports a 32-bit Cortex-M4F chip with a floating point unit, more than 8 MB of onboard storage, and a card reader so that you never run out of space. Except… all these megabytes of game assets must be rendered on a crummy LCD display with a resolution of 160×128:

Adafruit PyGamer promo shot.

Don’t get me wrong: I get the realities of designing disposable toys. You’re competing with Chinese sellers for the attention of apathetic customers who think that advanced electronics shouldn’t cost more than $24.95. But Nintendo Game Boy Color had more pixels than this! And it came out in 1998 with an 8-bit CPU on board.

I covered the 32-bit use case in an earlier article, highlighting the ease of hooking up a bare-metal MCU to Newhaven NHD-2.8-240320AF-CSXP-F — a much nicer 320×240 IPS module that is well-suited for handheld games and can easily deliver 30+ fps:

Bob the Cat with a crisp, full-color LCD.

If you have less RAM or less CPU power at your disposal, lower-resolution displays still make sense — but in that category, RGB OLED modules are a wiser pick. Not only do they perform and look better, but they’re surprisingly easy to use: no need for an OS, drivers, or any third-party code. To many, display hardware feels like black magic, but most of it is essentially plug-and-play.

To illustrate, let’s have a look at Solomon Systech SSD1353 and SSD1333: a pair of controllers embedded in a number of small OLED displays, including Newhaven NHD-1.91-176176UBC3 (176×176, 1.9”) and NHD-1.8-160128UBC3 (160×128, 1.8”). The hook-up is trivial: the modules have integrated DC-DC voltage converters, so all we need to do is supply around 3.3 V and then connect the module to an MCU using a 8080-style parallel bus (8 lines + WR and D/C). The module will read one input byte on every rising edge of the WR signal. If D/C is zero, the byte is interpreted as a command; otherwise, it’s data.

On the software side, we need to wait about 20 ms, pull the RESET- line low for ~100 µs, and then wait around 10 ms for the controller to start up. At that point, the chip should be in a predictable state, but the panel itself will be turned off. Using the 1.8” module as an example, the next step is to send command 0xA8 (“set multiplex ratio”), followed by a data byte set to 127 decimal. The controller can handle up to 132 rows, but the panel has just 128, so we need to tell the chip where to stop.

After that, we send command 0xA0 (“set re-map & data format”), followed by 0b10110000. This is a combination of several bit fields to set 18-bpp color mode, disable interlacing, and reverse row order to match the orientation of this particular panel on its PCB. It is also possible to configure 16-bpp color (aka RGB565); this is more memory-efficient, but less intuitive to work with.

The final configuration step is to send the following commands specific to the actual glass panel used by Newhaven in the 1.8” module:

0xB1 0b00100010   → precharge time 5 cycles, discharge time 2 cycles
0xB3 0b01000000   → fosc = 440 kHz, for ~30 fps refresh
0xBB 8            → precharge voltage 0.16×Vcc
0x83 106          → red current:   42%
0x82 96           → green current: 38%
0x81 117          → blue current:  46%

The values are taken from the Newhaven spec; the panel will work if you omit the sequence, but it will be running less efficiently and the colors might be slightly off.

With the configuration out of the way, we can send the 0xAF command (“display on”) and wait about 1 ms. After that, you select a frame buffer region to write to by using the following pair of three-byte instructions:

0x15 x_start x_end   → sets horizontal range ("set column address")
0x75 y_start y_end   → sets vertical range ("set row address")

Once the region is selected, we send 0x5C (“write RAM”) and start streaming pixel data. Each pixel consists of three bytes — blue, green, red, in this order — with permissible color component values ranging from 0 to 63.

An example implementation of an SSD1353 graphics stack for an 8-bit microcontroller with 16 kB of RAM can be found in my earlier gaming project, Sir Box-a-Lot. I originally designed the project for another now-obsolete display module, but ported it to SSD1353 this week:

SSD1353 at work.

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