Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Tiny display needed

GH Crash

Member
Hunting for any and all help I can get.

I'm wanting to design a small circuit that uses a digital potentiometer in place of a mechanical one but I can't come up with a tiny (fit-on-the-board) display that will give me some indication of the wiper position of the digital pot. Any suggestion for a simple means of indicating wiper position for the digital pot?

I'm greatly restricted in the total area for the circuit board. The digital pot, its push button adjustment and whatever display needs to fit on a one by two inch board. Any type of display, volts, amps, resistance, just something that give indication of the wiper position would be good.

Displays that require a complex wired control board are probably outside my abilities. I know nothing about electronics or circuit design. I'm reasonably good at reading a circuit diagram and soldering tiny components onto a circuit board.

Any help, advice or suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated.
 
Interesting, ChrisP58.

Right now, the ATTiny is reading two port and storing both values, one for the initial PWM setpoint, the other for run time. The ATTiny also function as a regulator adjusting the PWM duty cycle so that the motor voltage stays constant even if supply voltage changes. The attached photo is the present ATTiny circuit. Another of my projects currently underway is to move the pots off the ATTiny board to make it smaller and lightener.
 

Attachments

  • PWM-Timer Circuit.jpg
    PWM-Timer Circuit.jpg
    94.1 KB · Views: 110
Here is an example of a project that has a small display.
Arduino meter
The code might help you.
When I did something like this I could not get the meter to curve, so I had a straight meter, to make the code simple. Like the bottom meter but I had the needle also straight. It just moved left and right. (simple)
1721337027050.png

My meter looked more like this, which is simple code.
1721337516999.png
 
I used a small 4 digit display that just requires 4 connections, 2 of them power.
30mm x 14mm. Around $2 from online sellers.
Operates with a TM1637 IC (included).
 
A quick update: Dave, my code writing friend, has bought several display screens to play with. He is trying to figure out what information we want to display and in what king of format. That will help in deciding how big/small a screen we need.

While Dave's doing the display thing, I'm ironing out some circuitry problems on the circuit board before adding the display.

In my spare time I'm working on (needing help on) a LIC protection circuit. I will start a new thread for that project.
 
I’ve had a similar issue before, and I found that using a tiny OLED display worked well. They’re small and don’t need a lot of power, which is great for tight spaces. You can use a simple microcontroller to read the digital pot’s position and display it on the OLED. The SSD1306 OLED displays are pretty common and have good support, so you might want to give them a shot. They should fit nicely on your board and give you the info you need.
 
Thanks guys, for all your help. I was in unknown territory and didn't know where to start. With your help, I've decided that a 128 by 32 display is about as small as I can go and still display all the information..

Let's close this thread and, possible, start a new one.
 

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top