OLED Display… on Your Monitor

Sam Peach was working on an IoT project, but (as happens way too often) halfway through he realized he didn’t actually have the proper OLED display on-hand. He did, however, have a computer that was orders of magnitude more powerful than the Arduino he was working with, so he decided to simply see if he could emulate the little screen on his larger computer screen.

The result is this open source SSD1206 emulator, as seen here. The setup is programmed in Rust. While it only runs on Windows at this point, since code is available, porting it to other systems shouldn’t be too difficult. One could even conceive of a similar setup ported to a smartphone, as a great way to repurpose old devices.

Usage is fairly straightforward. Just install the SSD1306 OLED emulator via the Arduino IDE library manager, then replace references to Adafruit_SSD1306 with Adafruit_SSD1306_EMULATOR. Flash the file to the Arduino, set baud rate, open the on-computer executable, and (optionally) reset your Aduino to sync frames. You can then see what would be displayed, without actually having to have a dedicated screen.

Code is an early alpha build, so there are a variety of improvements in the works, but as-is it looks like a fun application to try out. This could be especially useful if you’ve ordered a display or two via slow shipping, and would like to get started on your project today!