I'm looking for a display for a Pi that will work in direct bright sun, thus I think an LCD of some sort would make sense. I don't really need colour. just some sort of 'dark on light' to display text etc.
What's available? Are there any HDMI interface LCD displays?
I could use one of the HD44780 displays driven directly from the Pi (i.e. not HDMI) but I really want something a little bigger.
Can anyone suggest anything suitable?
On a sunny day (Wed, 12 Oct 2022 10:23:50 +0100) it happened Chris Green snipped-for-privacy@isbd.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@esprimo.zbmc.eu>:
The only displays I know to work in bright direct sunlight are 'e-ink' displays, those are black on white. I have seen some projects using those for raspberries, years ago, maybe googling a bit will find one.
There are displays like these:
(there may be Linux drivers to enable an SPI display to show the desktop, something that would need investigating for your specific display)
Theo
I'm not wanting to display a desktop, the display is for use on a boat instrument panel to show things like battery voltages, temperatures and rudder position.
The above are interesting but the slow refresh is a bit of a nuisance as the rudder possition display needs to refresh reasonably frequently.
The 10" one is a bit pricey too! :-)
I'll expand a little on what I'm doing:-
On my boat I have a Beaglebone Black (boo, hiss say the Pi enthusiasts) which monitors the battery voltages, rudder position, etc. This has a 4 x 40 LCD display inside the boat, close to the BBB and driven directly by the BBB using its 4-bit data interface.
I want a similar display for the flying bridge which is several metres away from the BBB. Currently I have a 4 x 20 display driven by RS232 from the BBB but that's a bit flakey and the 4 x 20 display isn't really enough characters.
So I was considering running an HDMI display off the BBB as HDMI can do 10 metres or so, however the sun can be very bright, hence asking this question. It seems not to be a practical solution.
Thus what I think I will do is add a second BBB and put it on the flying bridge close to a second 4 x 40 LCD display. I already have wired ethernet so it's easy for BBB number two to get the values from BBB number one and I already know how to drive the display.
On a sunny day (12 Oct 2022 13:48:57 +0100 (BST)) it happened Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote in <XBw* snipped-for-privacy@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>:
Some years ago I bought a 'Pocket Book Aqua 2' especially for the boat, it is water-proof and has a 9x12 cm size e-ink black and white display. The idea was to use its wifi to connect to a raspberry running a web server or something with a navigation program, I wrote this once:
Substitute BBB with ESP32 to collect the data and serve it over wifi to other ESPs with tiny OLED displays. Ok... you will need spectacles. :) And that will free your BBB for other projects.
OK. So you want an LCD, but not the smartphone/tablet/laptop kind. I think it might be called a 'dot matrix graphic LCD', a bit like on older graphical calculators. They work with reflected light, rather than generating their own (although they can have backlights)
The '128x64 graphic LCD' seems to be a common format:
- just make sure whatever you get matches the controller supported by the code.
Theo
"Monochrome STN Dot-Matrix LCD" is what I'd call it. Or alternatively _not_ TFT.
Another option if the text size is a problem might be to use multiple larger numeric displays.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required