We will make a tiny connected message board with a 0.96″ OLED display that can be controlled from your phone. We will use the IFTTT “DO” app to set and clear the reminder so that no extra hardware will be required besides the OLED display. In addition to the reminder, our tiny message board can display 3 other lines, which we will use to display the daily weather temperature forecast and a surf report, which will be pushed via a couple of IFTTT recipes.
The message board uses a Particle photon (Arduino compatible) for the brain and internet connectivity and a 128×64 monochrome OLED display.
Let’s get started.
- A Particle photon microcontroller $20
- A 0.96″ I2C Monochrome OLED display $10. Also available on the ADAFRUIT web store.
- A small Breadboard $3
- Breadboard wiring
- An enclosure for the project (a mint box will work)
Step 2: Wiring
The I2C display requires only 4 connections:
- GND and VCC, which we can conveniently get from the Photon’s pins 3V3 and GND, and
- SDA and SCL which we will connect to the Photon’s D0 and and D1 respectively.
The display consists of 128×64 pixels, which corresponds to 8 rows of 8 pixels (font size 1) or 4 lines of 16 pixels if we use a font size of 2. Our display is “monochrome”, but the first line of text is yellow and the rest is blue, so we will use the first line for our reminder and the other 3 lines for other information such as surf report and weather for the day (or whatever else is important to you).
Step 3: Software
We will use the Particle web IDE to write and upload the software to the Photon. I will assume that you have already successfully gone through the registration steps outlined here: getting started.
Read more: Make A Tiny Message Board Using Arduino
