Qwiic Transparent OLED HUD Hookup Guide

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Introduction

Clear screens are no longer a thing of the Sci-Fi world! The Qwiic Transparent OLED HUD (Head Up Display) is SparkFun's answer to all of your futuristic transparent HUD needs. While you can see through the display, each segment is area colored, meaning that while no one segment can change colors, there are different colored segments on the display.

SparkFun Transparent OLED HUD Breakout (Qwiic)

LCD-15079

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Required Materials

To follow along with this tutorial, you will need the following materials. You may not need everything though depending on what you have. Add it to your cart, read through the guide, and adjust the cart as necessary.

Microcontroller

The Transparent OLED HUD requires quite a bit of RAM, so you'll need a microcontroller with at least 5500 bytes of RAM to control everything. Check out the below for some possible options.

Arduino Mega 2560 R3

DEV-11061

$48.40

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SparkFun SAMD21 Mini Breakout

DEV-13664

$22.50

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SparkFun ESP32 Thing

DEV-13907

$23.50

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SparkFun RedBoard Turbo - SAMD21 Development Board

DEV-14812

$19.95

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SparkFun ESP8266 Thing - Dev Board

WRL-13711

$18.50

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Teensy 3.6

DEV-14057

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Warning! The Arduino sketch required to drive this display requires quite a bit of dynamic memory, meaning that it is not going to fit on a smaller controller like an ATmega328. Any controller with larger RAM should have no problem. It has been tested to run very well on an Arduino Mega 2560. In addition, your 3.3v source should be robust enough to supply around 400mA to the display.

Cable

Now to get into the Qwiic ecosystem, the key will be using a Qwiic shields to match your preference of microcontroller. In this tutorial, we'll be using Qwiic-to-breadboard adapter cable. You will also need a cable to upload code to your microcontroller.