I've worked with SPI OLED displays before and wanted to move up from my monochrome 0.95" display to a color 1.5". I thought this would be fairly simple because I was able to get the 0.95" SPI display working on my Pi3, so getting the new display to work on the Pi4 then porting my code over should be no problem, right? Wrong. I've been working on this for a couple days now and I can't even get the test code to work on it, or see if it is getting power, or even if it works. There is literally no indication that the screen is even getting power from the RPi GPIO, not even a little led.
So, as an example of the poor documentation here are the steps the manufacturer laid out to install the libraries:
Click to download the bcm2835-1.39 libraries or bcm2835-1.45 libraries. You can also obtain the latest version from the bcm2835 website:
Copy the installation package into your own system, enter the bcm2835 libraries folder, then do this to install:
./configure
make
sudo make check
sudo make install
Here is what I've had to do because the product page was last updated in 2017 and there have been multiple version changes and depreciations since then.
chmod +x configure : because the configure was not set to executable
./configure : actually run the file
sudo apt-get install automake : because it doesn't come installed on raspbian
automake --add-missing : to create the ./compile which was not created previously
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/aclocal /usr/bin/aclocal-1.13 : the make is looking for a specific version of aclocal and fails so I created a symbolic link to the automake
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/automake /usr/bin/automake-1.13 : for the same reason
make : hey it didn't immediately error out but now I'm getting this
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -g -O2 -MT test.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/test.Tpo -c -o test.o test.c
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:16:9: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘geteuid’; did you mean getenv’? [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
if (geteuid() == 0 && !getenv("FAKEROOTKEY"))
^~~~~~~
getenv
[other assorted errors]
[FAIL]
Anyway, if that excites you then have at it. If you're like me and are willing to put up with some hardware idiosyncrasies to just get back to doing the cool stuff with the coding then look elsewhere. I'm all googled/binged out. This will go into a small pile of stuff that seemed like a good idea at first, and then turned to a huge waste of time. I can do the same thing with an official 3" LCD display and some jumper wires but I liked the idea of a lower power display that didn't throw off a lot of unnecessary light.
| Brand | Waveshare |
|---|---|
| Model number | 1.5inch RGB OLED Module |
| Part Number | 1.5inch RGB OLED Module |
| Batteries Included | No |
| Batteries Required | No |
| Package Dimensions | 6.86 x 5.08 x 2.29 cm; 45 Grams |
| Item Weight | 45 g |
| ASIN | B07DBXMFSN |
| Item Model Number | 1.5inch RGB OLED Module |
| Date First Available | 29 March 2019 |
