Flexible Grayscale Display - 1.81

This is a small flexible, grayscale OLED display. That’s right, we said flexible. We’ve been hearing about flexible displays for years, it’s finally here! You can’t fold it like paper but this OLED from Wisechip can be bent to a 40mm radius without damage. The display is than 0.5mm thick, less than 0.5 grams, and can display some impressive graphics with great contrast.

The OLED display is 1.81" long with 160x32 4-bit grayscale pixels. The interface is 3-wire SPI and each pixel requires 4 bits. This means you will need a processor capable of storing a local array of 80*32 = 2,560 bytes in order to truly flex (pun intended) the power of the grayscale display. Basic 8-bit Arduinos can communicate with the display and do things like text but graphics will be tricky.

The carrier board generates the 12V required to drive the OLED display. The carrier board also has a signal buffer so that you can drive the display from any 3.3V or 5V microcontroller. However, because of the nature of the TXB0104 you must power the board with 3.5V or more. Your microcontroller can be 3.3V or 5V but we recommend you power the carrier board with 5V.

We’ve ported the MicroOLED library so you can do things like print text (two sizes) and the neat 7-segment number font. The library is complete and can be downloaded from the Arduino library manager (search “flexible oled”). We’ve provided a pile of examples to get you started. You can even help us make the library better!