October 26, 2025
Last time, we found that I had made a fatal blunder in my PCB design, in addition to a lot of other little mistakes. I corrected all these errors and sent the new design to JLCPCB.
When the new boards arrived, I soldered on the connector, flashed the board, placed both board and display on the carrier, and...
(Click on images to see them up close.)
It works! With some more experimentation I discovered that I could only display colors that have red in them, which turned out to be the fault of a poorly soldered red data pin. You can see that introducing noise on the right side of the screen in the image above. With that fixed...
It really works! Of course, my Rust image formatter was interpreting the byte order incorrectly, so this image looks like it's been interlaced or something, but with that fixed...
This screen is pretty cool, but it's not as cool as I was expecting. For one, its viewing angles are surprisingly bad (I expected this, memory displays are known for poor angles), but it's very dependent on having a well-aligned light source. Is that any different from, say, a Game Boy Advance? Not really, and this thing is distinct enough to earn its shortcomings. I do wonder if other manufacturers' displays are more visible, or if maybe the reflector behind the screen is also sub-par, or whatever.
Here's some more pictures, in various lighting situations. I particularly like the way a full solid color looks in the sun, which is why some of the pictures here have glare from light sources visible on the screen's surface.
The marks on the screen are what I mentioned last time: the bubble wrap that DigiKey wrapped the displays in left bubble-shaped residue on the surface of the screen.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased with what I've done so far. In the worldline where I bought the displays when they were in stock in March, I would have reached what you see above in maybe May of this year, not October, but it's fiiinnneee.
Now that Sharpie works, here's what I have planned next: