Watch display

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Revision as of 15:16, 6 December 2015 by DavidCary (talk | contribs) (link to related articles, etc.)
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The display is perhaps the most critical part of a wrist computer such as the uWatch and the Open Source Watch.

The history of the uWatch mentions the 53mm x 20mm compact 16x2 line LCD that convinced David L. Jones that the uWatch project was actually doable with off-the-shelf components. If you are doing low-level programming of the uWatch, such as making "custom characters", you might want to look at the datasheet (via "Moon Phases").

Alas, that original display pulls about 2 mA, more power than anything else on the uWatch -- even the CPU uses less power (at 250 KHz). That's the main reason the current uWatch cannot run the display continuously (like a standard watch), but much be explicitly "turned on" every time you want to read the time.

The current uWatch2 rough draft seems likely to use the Newhaven NHD-C12832A1Z-FSW-FBW-3V3 128x32 Pixels display. Which uses less than 100uA which would enable a continuous display watch. The "white LED backlight" uses 30 mA at 3.0 V but is still very usable at much lower currents.

Proposed displays: Limited to less than 10 mW of power when updating the time once a second (FIXME: reduce this limit and prune higher-power displays when this list gets too long): In no particular order:

Some threads discussing diplays: "Hardware Stuff » Why not a smaller LCD...",