It’s simple to transform jaded by way of trendy microcontrollers: for only a few greenbacks you’ll get a MCU that’s robust sufficient to offer a desktop pc from the early 90s a run for its cash whilst packing in recent generation like WiFi and Bluetooth. For plenty of tasks we don’t even need to imagine optimizing our code, as a result of we aren’t even scratching the skin of what the {hardware} is able to.
However once in a while you don’t have the posh of the use of the latest-and-greatest chip, and need to play the hand you’re dealt. That’s when other people like [Larry Bank] in point of fact shine. In a up to date write-up, he is going over his experiments with riding e-paper presentations (particularly, salvaged digital shelf labels) with 8-bit MCUs that on paper shouldn’t have the assets to run them.
The issue is that those presentations usually be expecting to be passed a fully-formed symbol, which is able to simply exceed the unfastened RAM on a low-end chip. As an example, a 1-bit 128 x 128 symbol would eat 2 KB of RAM — greater than 4 instances the to be had reminiscence on an ATtiny85.
As [Larry] explains, his change way is to write down information to the show in columns which might be just one byte huge. Blended along with his present paintings with symbol decompression on constrained {hardware}, he’s in a position to abruptly draw out full-screen TIFF pictures the use of an Arduino UNO as demonstrated within the video after the spoil. He hopes the paintings will encourage others to experiment with what’s imaginable the use of the dinky MCUs you usually in finding in second-hand shelf labels.
