How about a cheap serial terminal for less than a fiver all-in?
In a previous blog entry I’ve been working on more developments for the increasingly powerful home control system using an Arduino as a kind of universal I2c peripheral to the ESP8266. The reason for that is just the vast range of driver software our there and the fact that from China you can get an Arduino-Nano-type-board for under £2. There are drivers for just about everything so it seems daft to just ignore that. It ends up cheaper than most actual i2c peripheral boards.
First thing I had to do with the Arduino base code was increase the size of the buffer used for storing I2c and that is covered elsewhere – but finally I got that working. In the process that led me to the idea of a prototyping board with both the ESP8266, running the home control 2016 software AND a 328 to power some peripheral devices and give extra IO pins.
In the process of THAT I got the QDTECH boards running (128*160 LCD – cheap) – and that also is covered in a previous blog entry. These are great – and cheap (though not as cheap since Banggood jacked the price up but thankfully there is still AliExpress – thanks to Squonk for that particular link) but they are a little limited in terms of resolution as any kind of terminal. I even found a little bit of code to do vertical scrolling. Fast enough but then it is a low resolution display.
In the meantime however I pulled out another favourite display of mine, the ILI9340-driven displays at 320*240 – at £3.47 – mind you if you go to the Italian version of Aliexpress they seem to go down to just over £3. The increased resolution of these means you really COULD make a nice monitoring terminal but for one thing – speed. I checked out several implementations including the Adafruit ones and the drawing speed is atrocious – attempts to scroll the display are generally abysmal unless you use a fast processor.
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