Today I learned how to make fonts of any size and display inscriptions with them on a screen connected to an Arduino. Dealing with this turned out to be more difficult than one might have expected.
In order to make the informer screen (https://ammo1.livejournal.com/1114988.html) I ordered an Arduino Wi-Fi board on Aliexpress for $ 5 and 3.95 "screen for $ 12, which is simply placed on the second floor on the Arduino board and does not require wiring.
Arduina's seller wrote that it has dip-switches that select the operating modes of two processors (ATmega328 and ESP8266), but forgot to describe the purpose of the switches. This board does not have a specific name, so the switch assignment table was not immediately found. But I still found it in some Russian store selling such boards.
Screen seller offered to download from LCDWiki set of libraries and programs for this screen. I downloaded it, launched it, and began to beat at first so that the text was simply displayed not in the vertical position of the screen, but in the horizontal one. Then I tried to figure out how to make my own font. Included was a PCtoLCD200 program with a completely Chinese interface. I figured out at random how to make a font, but what to do with it further is unknown. There are no instructions. More precisely, there are many instructions, but they are all not about that. And if you display large text in the default font, you get such a horror.
Trying to find instructions on the website iarduino.ru information was found about the UTFT library that supports many screens, including this one. On the website of the author of the library Rinky-Dink Electronics there is also the library itself and online tool to create any typeface.
And then everything is simple: in any editor we create a picture with all the characters of the font (there are two types of fonts - alphabetic with 95 characters and digital with 10 characters).
Then, using an online tool, we make a font from this picture. A file with the ".c" extension is obtained, which must be placed in the UTFT library folder.
And finally, connect your font and write whatever you want to it.
The main thing now is that these large fonts do not take up all the Arduino's memory and there is enough space for everything else. :)
P.S. I don't understand how people do anything non-standard on Arduino. As soon as you try to do at least something, not like everyone else, it immediately turns out that you need to look for everything at random and by typing.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project - lamptest.ru. I test LED bulbs and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.