display-infotec-brunel-clock

An Adafruit GFX compatible driver for the Infotec brunel clock GV60-based dot matrix display.

Hardware

• Display dimensions: 96 × 26
• Operating voltage: 3.3V
• Power voltage: 5V

Schematic

See the KiCad project for the full schematic.

PCB Design

Prototype

Installation

Add the following to your platformio.ini:

lib_deps =
    adafruit/Adafruit BusIO
    adafruit/Adafruit GFX Library
    https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/display-infotec-brunel-clock

Dependencies

• Adafruit BusIO
• Adafruit GFX Library
• ESP32 with FreeRTOS (required for the keepalive task)

Usage

#include <BrunelClock.h>

BrunelClockSPI spi1(D1, D3, D5, D8);
BrunelClockSPI spi2(D0, D2, D4, D7);
BrunelClock display(&spi1, &spi2);

void setup() {
    display.begin();
    display.fillScreen(0);
    display.setCursor(0, 0);
    display.print("Hello");
    display.display();
}

void loop() {
    // update display as needed
    display.display();
}

Since BrunelClock inherits from GFXcanvas1, the full Adafruit GFX API is available for drawing text, shapes, and bitmaps. Call display.display() to flush the canvas to the hardware.

Examples

Three examples are included in the examples/ directory. To build and flash them, clone the repository and run:

# Show a hardware test pattern
pio run -t upload -e test

# Show a checkerboard pattern
pio run -t upload -e checkerboard

# Scroll two lines of text around the display
pio run -t upload -e movingwords

Acknowledgements

Inspired by the BigClock library by Daniel Swann (Nottingham Hackspace), available at https://github.com/daniel1111/BigClockSnake. The reverse engineering work of the display's segment layout and SPI protocol was instrumental in the development of this library.