At the recent CAMJAM I got lots of questions about a small OLED display I was using as part of a home lighting control project.

If you are looking to include a small inexpensive status display on your next project, one of these may be just what you need. Prices range from around £16 from the UK Adafruit distributors to £6 on a UK Ebay site – if you are happy to take a bit of chance you can find them even cheaper from sites in the Far East.  

The picture to the right gives you an idea of how much you can display – this is a single colour 132 * 64 pixels module. The great thing about these displays is being OLED, they don’t have a backlight avoiding the separate drive circuit often needed for ‘traditional’ LCDs.

The modules generally seem to come  with either and I2C or SPI interface.  I have only used I2C varients but the driver software from Adafruit can be configured for either type.

It is worth highlighting that all the small displays of this type that I have seen run on 3.3V not 5V – I have not had any problems running them directly from the Pi 3.3v supply.

Configuring a Pi to drive them was quick and simple – follow this link to see some detailed instructions that work for me.