Exotic Round Displays and How to Use Them

this video is brought to you by skillshare more about them in a minute are you tired of being called square are you feeling cornered by your sad outdated display technology well don't worry because where we're going we don't need corners actually we probably do using displays without corners is very frustrating we'll talk more about it later in the episode [Music] that's right round displays they're here well they've been here for a while but mostly in the form of wearable tech but now they're making bigger batter and rounder well they're not technically round or they're all pretty circular displays but they look awesome you can buy them you can use them and that's what we're going to talk about today also i've broken up this video into several chapters so you can skip around to exactly the topic you most desire and i also want to get this out of the way all of the links to every display i mentioned and more are in the description i've also added links to code and what other relate to using these displays so check the description if you want to buy them please don't leave a comment asking me where i got these i've already told you and extra disclaimer i have no affiliation with any of the companies that make these displays i just think they're really cool all right let's uh let's get to it i am genuinely excited that skillshare is today's sponsor because i am very much a fan of self learning and if you don't already know skillshare is an online community with thousands of classes for creators where you can explore new skills deepen your existing passions and get lost in creativity when i started learning electronics like 30 years ago there weren't as many resources available but i can genuinely say that picking up an arduino in 2009 changed my life in a way that i never could have imagined and i really wish i'd started even sooner that's why i can't recommend enough mark fraunfelder's introduction to arduino class where you can get a grip on the basics of microcontrollers and start building cool things with electronics but if you've already gotta handle that sort of thing skillshare has a lot more to offer like classes about raspberry pi python electronics graphic design and more it's curated specifically for learning meaning there are no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you and the first 1000 of my subscribers who click the link in the description below will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today all right first up is this little guy right here this is a breakout board made by wave share but the specific raw lcd itself has a gc9a01 controller catchy it is a 1.28 ips display with a specific resolution of 240 by 240 pixels so it looks sharp i used this model in my wheatley crab and also in my animatronic glados head as her eye now to be clear this is more of a raw component it's not plug and play to use this you'll need to have some basic electronics and embedded software experience and connected to a microcontroller platform like an arduino right now i'm controlling it with a teensy 4.0 via the spy bus at 40 megahertz of course you can run it with nearly any 3.3 volt microcontroller at a lower bust speed but the refresh rate will not be as good this is one of the cheaper options that you can get and it's available on amazon and it's pretty good even though one annoying thing it has these really nice mounting points and it comes with a cable harness but the lcd is not aligned to the pcb that accurately so if you use these mounting points it's not going to be centered perfectly with the center of the screen kind of annoying but you get what you pay for and you don't pay a whole lot for it next up we've got a bigger and tidier option i've snagged a 2.1 inch screen from pymeroni part of their hyperpixel line of displays it's also ips and this model is 480 by 480 pixels with a capacitive touchscreen and it connects via dpi so you don't need to muck about with any wires if you don't mind basically sacrificing all of your gpio it does have a spare i squared c bus right here configuring it is fairly easy if you're rocking the raspberry pi os just gently pop it on run the install script and you're basically good to go using this for the main gui where are you i recorded the first installation live and nothing happened i double checked the connections i swapped out the pies i changed the power supply and eventually i did a fresh i did a fresh install of pi os and went through the installation script again i spent an hour running through all of this only to realize uh that some lower level issue was wrong i've left a link to that solve in the description because it's way more technical than i can easily explain here but it's not hard to fix and eventually i got it working and look at that it's beautiful absolutely beautiful but if you want something bigger well have i got the display for you jumping up the scale i've also picked up a 3.4 inch diameter lcd with a capacitive touchscreen now we are at the level where there are ready-made hdmi driver boards so this one came with a board that has a mini hdmi port and a micro usb for power technically this board also has connections for a for speakers and the i squared c connection for the touch driver although i wasn't able to find any library or documentation for the touch driver i'm sure it's not too hard but that's a lot more work that i want to do for just this display if anything having the capacitive touchscreen version means this has a nice uh durable glass cover instead of the raw lcd so it's a lot better for integrating although it is still basically a raw display i couldn't find any that already have an enclosure i still need to model this one because i've got big plans for this one and let's uh let's plug it in i want to see well i have seen this one i know what it looks like and i know it looks amazing so i'm just going to go ahead and plug that in via usb and where's my hdmi cable all right let's see if that goes in there if you heard the windows ding oh there we go ah look at that so i didn't plan this the very first time i tested it but my screen saver is obviously a uh picture an actual image of mars and it is centered perfectly on the screen and it looks try not to get the glare in there it looks fantastic i still have the protective plastic on there so the reflection isn't truly what it would be but this one's also ips fantastic viewing angle and uh i just i can't get enough of how beautiful this particular model is but i hear you this isn't big enough what if you want a big boy a big boy round lcd screen well have i got the display wait i just i already said that that's right kids this is a five inch 1080p display and as far as i know this is the largest model that you could currently buy and i'm sure there's more but if anyone says you know call us for a quote it's probably not affordable and this is also not affordable these currently run about 200 us dollars but i mean come on that's ridiculous now if you already watch my channel you'll recognize this i have temporarily borrowed it from wheatley because i'm building an animatronic personality core so you should stick around for that i actually do build stuff with all these things i don't just put them in a box and look at them and feel guilt occasionally anyway this is very similar to the 3.4 inch display there's just a ribbon cable with a mippy connection to the hdmi driver board this one is just a bit larger i've 3d printed a frame for it to keep everything nice and tidy and one thing i didn't realize until later on is these uh hdmi driver boards are pretty ubiquitous from all the other weird lcd modules that i can tell and what's nice is the manufacturers made the bolt pattern the same as a raspberry pi so you can very neatly mount a pie to one of these lcd driver boards and in my wheatley build that's exactly how that comes together so uh since this is just a regular hdmi connection and requires usb for power that means we can still plug it into a regular computer now here is the secret that they don't want you to know round displays are still just square displays there's no polar interface with radial coordinates and things like that it's still a cartesian system and this still has a driver that thinks it has a square display arranged in rows and columns and when i plug it in let's power that on in case you're wondering i have no idea what these buttons do there's i haven't found any documentation for these boards yet but if you know of any i would love to see it so just plug it in via hdmi nothing special and here is my martian screensaver and it is ugh man it's just gorgeous so this particular model is not capacitive touch this is just a bare lcd but um as far as i can tell it's also running at 60 hertz and it i mean it's it's ips it's beautiful it works can you actually use it though now for a game like portal 2 where you basically don't have a hud um it's really not too bad i mean you can actually play something everything's really centrally focused anyway i don't have the sound on but uh i mean it looks great like this is it's a modern it's a modern display there's nothing strange about it it's perfectly perfectly usable what have you done lately i mean still perfectly usable for things that don't have edge focused uis so not too bad minecraft's ui is centered on the screen so this actually works out pretty well i could totally use this so as you can see uh web browsing is technically possible but so much of the user interface is lost in the corners that it's really not practical and that's fine like these aren't meant to be used as external monitors also complete tangent i forgot i made a 3d model of this screen so i will share the cad files for that down below as well as the files for the smaller gc9801 display so if you want to use these you don't have to do the extra work to incorporate them into something that you want to build speaking of which i have some other project plans aside from wheatley that involve around screens and i want to run them by you guys and see what you want to see so first up i was really uh keen on the idea of making a dragon radar i think it would be absolutely perfect i think this guy would be a good candidate the pymaroni display have a little gps in there and maybe do a reverse geocache that can find the dragon balls that would be really fun also i have my rotary cell phone design and making a rotary clamshell flip phone maybe i think that would be amazing and uh oh well what was the other one oh yeah maybe this thing um i don't exactly know what to call it because it's from some sort of old science fiction magazine supposedly um but i really like it anyway if you have an idea for something that you would like to see made with a round screen leave a comment down below and i will choose one person who leaves a project idea to receive one of these guys so you will have your very own round lcd but if you just want to buy your own i've still got the links in the description below so that does it thanks for watching let me know if you want to know more about any other weird displays and i am your guy

Channel: Mr. Volt

Views: 331,128

Keywords: Round, Display, Aliexpress, monitor, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 4, Pimoroni, GC9A01, Hyperpixel, OEM, Mr. Volt, Cyberdeck, ST7789, Alibaba, Raspberry Pi Zero

Id: eJBDXjI5Zu4

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021