Freeware OLED Pixel generation software “OLED Pixxler”

OLED Pixxler

I started a little Arduino project involving an OLED (SSD1306) display using the u8glib library. I faced the issue that I wanted a few custom pixel / bitmaps for the project and also wanted to propably animate the grafics… and its very inconvenient to write these little pixel fellas by hand converting bitmaps to hex representation not seeing what you are doing. 🙁 Thats why I wrote a little software to make my life easier: Scriblabs OLED Pixxler! Maybe somebody else finds it usefull too! 🙂

And futhermore its also a little practice for C# software writing. 😉

Please note: This is not a real paint program. Its just meant to click pixels of/on and exoprt it to a hex representation for usage for a small microcontroller project with OLED display.

What it can do?

With the Pixxler you can:

  • Create 1-bit bitmaps: click pixles on/of
  • Create bitmaps up to 32×32 pixels
  • Save a whole project of pixles in one file and work on it
  • A project consists of bitmaps and each bitmap can have frames
  • Export to an Arduino readable file
    • One bitmap to your custom template
    • The whole project to your custom template

A Pixxler-Project has this format:

  • Project
    • Bitmap
      • Frame 1
    • Bitmap
      • Frame 1
      • Frame 2
      • Frame 3
    • Bitmap etc.

So this is how the application looks like:

OLED pixel software

You always see the memory that the project takes so you can stay inside the posibilities of a small Arduino project. Furhermore you can manage multiple frames of one bitmap which will be exported in this format: YourBitmap_1[], YourBitmap_2[] etc.

OLED pixel software export screen

Add the exported file to your Arduino project (same folder as your sketch) and include it (here I named it “gfx.c”) like this:

Then call the drawBitmap() method of your u8gLib instance and give it your bitmap array as parameter:

This draws the bitmap at x=56, y=24 and tells the u8glib that the bitmap is 2 byte wide (16bits) and 16bits in height

Tada:

pixelOnOled

Conclusion

With this application its very easy to create pixel maps for your project and export it to a hex representation and easily transfer it to your Arduino project. Maybe in a future release the software also gets some more convenient drawing tools but for now it suits my needs.

I think I should also develop an animation system/class so one can easily include animation in the u8glib… more to come. 😉

Current version is available here: OLED Pixxler v0.1.0
Please note: you are using this software on your own risk.

History:
v0.1.0 – Initial release.

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29. October 2016 by Marius
Categories: Arduino, Programming, Software | Tags: , , | 1 comment