Interfacing to OLED from Zybo

[digilentUser1]

I have a Zybo board and was interested in the PmodOLED product. I am new to SPI and working with PMODs in general other than an SSD one so would be greatly appreciative if someone could assist me in the right direction.

I had a few questions about this and interfacing with the Zybo

1. Would this work with the Zybo board? Is there much other than constraints /pin assignments and clock rates that would need to change from the nexsys design that is available?

2. Where can I find out how to configure the device using the SPI? Ie what sequence of data transfers/configuration are required?

3.  How is power provided to the display?

                        Is it provided thru the Pmod interface? If so would this be automatic do to the  board layout on the Zybo or do I need to do something HDL in the FPGA to connect the PMOD Pins to power and ground?

Thanks

Dave

[JColvin]

Hi Dave,

I'm not the most familiar with FPGAs (or SoCs for that matter), but I am more familiar with the PmodOLED, so I'll answer what I can and ask some of our applications engineers for additional input.

1. It should work just fine with the ZYBO board, I'm not personally sure if there is much else that would need to be changed.

2. There are a few places where you can find that out. The source files for the Nexys 3 (and Nexys 4) projects have some code in them, if you're ok with C++ you can check out the c++ source files for the PmodOLED (in particular OledDriver.cpp and OledGrph.cpp) from the PmodOLED example code Wiki page. Alternatively, you can check out the datasheet for the SSD1306 Display controller that the PmodOLED uses starting around page 27. That one is a little harder to read since it's written as if you're writing data to it parallel which you cannot do with the PmodOLED since it uses the serial interface option, but it does list all of the commands possible.

3. The PmodOLED just needs a 3.3V power supply line and a ground line. Both of these are already available in one of the many Pmod headers on the ZYBO board, so you should not need to change anything otherwise in terms of power. But I'll let somebody who knows FPGAs better correct me if that is not the case.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks,
JColvin

[jpeyron]

Hi Dave,

If you are planning just using a bare FPGA design then the link that JColvin gave you has a project for the Nexys 4 for vivado that will work. You will need to change the xdc file so that it is for the Zybo. If you are trying to use the zynq architecture then you should first go throught the turtorials https://reference.digilentinc.com/zybo:zybo. The getting started is a great starting point for this.

Thank you,

Jon