FrameBuffer bitmaps of big LED-style numbers and weather icons

[DavesCodeMusings]

I like bit maps and I cannot lie. --Sir Mix-a-Lot

I was playing around with MicroPython FrameBuffer to draw bitmaps on an ssd1306 recently and found that it's pretty easy to reuse some of the bitmaps I had created for an old Arduino C++ weather station project. (The trick is using the MONO_HLSB format so they orient correctly.)

If anyone is interested, I have various seven-segment style numbers as well as weather symbols in the GitHub repository. There's also a web-based tool that lets you create whatever you want in an 8x8 up to 32x32 grid.

Below is an example of using FrameBuffer to display a 16x16 pixel black hole event horizon. The bytearray contents were lifted from my C-style array for weather icons and put inside a Python bufferarray. The code borrows heavily from an old MicroPython Forum discussion

from ssd1306 import SSD1306_I2C
from framebuf import FrameBuffer, MONO_HLSB
from machine import SoftI2C, Pin

# Adjust GPIO pin numbers as needed.
i2c = SoftI2C(scl=Pin(4), sda=Pin(5))
if 0x3C not in i2c.scan():
    raise RuntimeError("SSD1306 I2C display not found.")
oled = SSD1306_I2C(128, 32, i2c)

buffer = bytearray([199,192,159,240,56,56,112,28,96,12,224,14,224,14,224,14,224,14,240,30,120,60,127,252,63,248,31,242,7,198,0,0])
fb = FrameBuffer(buffer, 16, 16, MONO_HLSB)
oled.fill(0)
oled.blit(fb, 0, 0)
oled.show()

I thought it was more fun to have a display with big, bold, retro-looking LED style numbers than the usual tiny text, so I thought I'd share.