Upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0

While developing version 3.0 we made some breaking changes to the public API of this library. This document will help you update your code to work with version 3.0

Font Definitions

To get better performance and a smaller font definition format, we change the memory layout of the font definition format. If you are using custom fonts not included in this library we updated the font generator here. Please update your fonts to be working with 3.0 by selecting the respective version in the dropdown.

Architectural Changes

To become a more versatile library for the SSD1306 chipset we abstracted the hardware connection into subclasses of the base display class now called OLEDDisplay. This library is currently shipping with three implementations:

SSD1306Wire implementing the I2C protocol using the Wire Library.
SSD1306Brzo implementing the I2C protocol using the faster brzo_i2c library.
SSD1306Spi implementing the SPI protocol.

To keep backwards compatiblity with the old API SSD1306 is an alias of SSD1306Wire. If you are not using the UI components you don't have to change anything to keep your code working.

Name Changes

Naming things is hard, to better reflect our intention with this library we changed the name of the base class to OLEDDisplay and the UI library accordingly to OLEDDisplayUi. As a consequence the type definitions of all frame and overlay related functions changed. This means that you have to update all your frame drawing callbacks from:

bool frame1(SSD1306 *display,  SSD1306UiState* state, int x, int y);

too

void frame1(OLEDDisplay *display,  OLEDDisplayUiState* state, int16_t x, int16_t y);

And your overlay drawing functions from:

bool overlay1(SSD1306 *display,  SSD1306UiState* state);

too

void overlay1(OLEDDisplay *display,  OLEDDisplayUiState* state);

New Features

Loading Animation

While using this library ourself we noticed a pattern emerging. We want to drawing a loading progress while connecting to WiFi and updating weather data etc.

The simplest thing was to add the function drawProgressBar(x, y, width, height, progress) ,where progress is between 0 and 100, right to the OLEDDisplay class.

But we didn't stop there. We added a new feature to the OLEDDisplayUi called LoadingStages. You can define your loading process like this:

LoadingStage loadingStages[] = {
  {
    .process = "Connect to WiFi",
    .callback = []() {
      // Connect to WiFi
    }
  },
  {
    .process = "Get time from NTP",
    .callback = []() {
      // Get current time via NTP
    }
  }
  // more steps
};

int LOADING_STAGES_COUNT = sizeof(loadingStages) / sizeof(LoadingStage);

After defining your array of LoadingStages you can then run the loading process by using ui.runLoadingProcess(loadingStages, LOADING_STAGES_COUNT). This will give you a nice little loading animation you can see in the beginning of this video.

To further customize this you are free to define your own LoadingDrawFunction like this:

void myLoadingDraw(OLEDDisplay *display, LoadingStage* stage, uint8_t progress) {
  display->setTextAlignment(TEXT_ALIGN_CENTER);
  display->setFont(ArialMT_Plain_10);
  // stage->process contains the text of the current progress e.q. "Connect to WiFi"
  display->drawString(64, 18, stage->process);
  // you could just print the current process without the progress bar
  display->drawString(64, 28, progress);
}

After defining a function like that, you can pass it to the Ui library by use ui.setLoadingDrawFunction(myLoadingDraw).

Text Logging

It is always useful to display some text on the display without worrying to much where it goes and managing it. In 3.0 we made the OLEDDisplay class implement Print so you can use it like you would use Serial. We calls this feature LogBuffer and the only thing you have to do is to define how many lines you want to display and how many characters there are on average on each. This is done by calling setLogBuffer(lines, chars);. If there is not enough memory the function will return false.

After that you can draw the LogBuffer anywhere you want by calling drawLogBuffer(x, y). (Note: You have to call display() to update the screen) We made a video showing this feature in action.

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