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David Paule

Well Known Member
Saw this cutie on the Sparkfun website.

09678-01_i_ma.jpg


It's an OLED display, about an inch square. It's here: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9678.

Now please remember that I'm not an electrical expert. In fact I'm not even an amateur at that game. You'll have to develop this all by yourself.

What could this thing be used for?

* How about an AOA indicator?

* How about a multi-function warning device? Maybe each warning would have its own color scheme. Maybe the colors can shift to catch your attention.

Could it be the color of your instrument panel when it's not warning you of something?

Now I just stumbled across this display. I don't work for Sparkfun and in fact I've never even purchased anything from them. They're a local company, kind of popular, and I was browsing for things that might be useful. So there you have it: a nifty keen display that's ready for your imagination.

Dave
RV-3B, now building wings
 
These guys have some interesting OLED modules too, including Arduino and Raspberry PI displays, and some small LCDs with touch control. It looks like Sparkfun is a distributor too.

I was thinking about Garmin's G2000 when I saw those and thought a small OLED or LCD touch module would be a cool context-sensitive interface. The trick is interfacing with the other systems over serial or CAN or whatever, but enough vendors have been releasing specs to make that viable now.
 
Before you run off and start cutting 1" square holes in your panel, the brightness on this is 90 nits. 400 nits is barley adequate to see in the daytime and 1,200 is when something becomes truly daylight visible in any light, no matter what.

So I vote you can use them as panels that say "if you can read this, turn on your landing light" ;)

--Ian Jordan
Dynon Avionics
 
dynonsupport said:
Before you run off and start cutting 1" square holes in your panel, the brightness on this is 90 nits. 400 nits is barley adequate to see in the daytime and 1,200 is when something becomes truly daylight visible in any light, no matter what.

So I vote you can use them as panels that say "if you can read this, turn on your landing light" ;)

--Ian Jordan
Dynon Avionics
Click to expand...

Ian,

This is from wiki -

Outdoor performance - As an emissive display technology, OLEDs rely completely upon converting electricity to light, unlike most LCDs which are to some extent reflective; e-ink leads the way in efficiency with ~ 33% ambient light reflectivity, enabling the display to be used without any internal light source. The metallic cathode in an OLED acts as a mirror, with reflectance approaching 80%, leading to poor readability in bright ambient light such as outdoors. However, with the proper application of a circular polarizer and anti-reflective coatings, the diffuse reflectance can be reduced to less than 0.1%. With 10,000 fc incident illumination (typical test condition for simulating outdoor illumination), that yields an approximate photopic contrast of 5:1.

Sounds like it would be OK outdoors in bright sun (10,000 ft. candles) but might have the old polarized glasses problem.

5:1 contrast would be OK for simple warning labels wouldn't it?

The data sheet does say "OLED can be seen in daylight without backlight"
 
We've tried a couple OLED screens around here and even in Seattle sunlight, they are insufficient in our opinion. But technology does change and advance and maybe we haven't experienced an OLED with the appropriate enhancements.

One example of this is the Icom A210 radio that uses an OLED display, and there are complaints about it's daylight visibility.

Admittedly, you can never really know until you try it, but this isn't a simple known case like a 1,200 nit LCD that will "just work".

No trying to discourage any neat projects. Just trying to give some data from my own experience with OLED in sunlight so that people don't get too far into a project without realizing a deficiency once it's in the real world.

--Ian
 
A-210

I have no problem at all with the visibility on the Icom, in fact I was thinking just the opposite.
Tim

Dues paid!
 
Well, At Least I learned Something

Hadn't known what a nit is. 1 nit = 1 cd/m^2. Now I know - thanks!

And haven't seen anything the right size and brightness on that one website yet.

Dave
 
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