STM32 Software SPI SSD1331 Sketch

In a previous post, I wrote about designing a ‘breakout board’ for an SSD1331 OLED display with 96×64 pixels and 16 bits of color per pixel. With the hardware already put together, this post will cover writing a basic software driver for the displays. To keep things simple, we will talk to the display using software SPI functions instead of the STM32’s SPI hardware peripheral.

If you want to skip assembling your own boards, you can also buy a pre-made display such as this one sold by Adafruit. They have also written a library for these displays which works with several common types of microcontrollers, if you just want to use them without worrying about the display settings. But if you want to try understanding this sort of communication at a lower level, read on!

The finished program will display a predefined framebuffer, like this little logo!

Since many small microcontrollers – including the STM32F031K6 discussed in this example – don’t have 12KB of RAM available to store a 96×64 display at 16 bits per pixel, I’ll use a framebuffer with just 4 bits per pixel in this example (3KB), and map those 16 values to a palette. This example builds on the first few “Bare Metal STM32 Programming” tutorials that I’ve been writing, so here is a Github repository with the entire example project (including supporting files) if you don’t want to read those.