The panel driver counts ring refills, the largest gap between refills,
frame swaps, swap timeouts and I2S TX FIFO underruns (takeStats()). The
ESPHome component checks them every 10 s and logs a warning only when the
ESP32 side of the signal had a problem, plus a debug summary per minute.
Measured with Wi-Fi on: ~4600 refills/s, max gap < 0.4 ms (lead 1.7 ms),
no underruns or timeouts, so remaining blinks come from the signal being
disturbed on the wires (Wi-Fi transmit bursts), not from the refresh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Driver (components/el512/el512_panel.*, ESP-IDF only):
- DMA ring of 8 x 4 lines (17 KB) refilled from the I2S EOF interrupt
(IRAM) instead of a 142 KB full-frame stream; ~107 KB heap freed.
- 256-entry lookup table encodes 8 pixels per step.
- Back buffer + displayed buffer, swapped at the start of a frame.
- PlatformIO builds it via lib_extra_dirs (EL512Core); lib/EL512 keeps
the Adafruit GFX front end.
ESPHome external component (platform: el512):
- DisplayBuffer with optional ENABLE / _LOWPWR pins, set_enabled(),
set_low_power(), helper functions for page lambdas.
- still_alive_page: plays the Portal end-credits show, then returns to
the previous page.
Still Alive engine moved to components/el512/still_alive.* with a built-in
5x7 font (from Adafruit GFX, BSD); the PlatformIO demo uses the same code.
The importer writes components/el512/still_alive_data.h and stops at 200 s
(--until-ms), matching the hand-trimmed data.
esphome/el512-panel.yaml: 8 pages (clock, forecast, agenda, dashboard,
now playing, Plex, solar, Still Alive), page select, rotation, display
and low-power switches, message text. home_assistant/packages/el512_panel.yaml:
helper template sensors for forecast, agenda, now playing and Plex streams.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The source page splits some lines into several spans; a browser renders the
whitespace between them as a space, which the importer dropped ("becausewe").
It now adds that space. Regenerated imported.h.
Add a photo of the demo on the panel to the README.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Commit src/still_alive/imported.h instead of ignoring it. The importer now
writes a source reference (SDSkyKlouD/still-alive-web) and a disclaimer
(Jonathan Coulton / Valve, personal non-commercial use, not affiliated) at
the top of the file; the README carries the same disclaimer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- src/still_alive: timed console text, typed scrolling credits and ASCII art,
laid out for 512x256 (41x31 console, 41x9 credits, 41x20 picture).
Plays placeholder content unless imported.h exists.
- tools/import_still_alive.py: generates the git-ignored imported.h (text,
timing, art, credits) from SDSkyKlouD/still-alive-web.
- platformio.ini: envs still_alive (default) and esp32dev (test images,
moved to src/test_images).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Uninverted, the rising BCK edge landed on the boundary between byte pairs,
so the panel sampled data mid-change and the image jittered. Inverted, the
edge sits mid-pair; verified stable on the panel. Also note the row-stripe
brightness drift as an open item.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PCNT measurement showed I2S0 BCK (VCLK) rising once per two bytes in 8-bit
LCD mode, so the panel saw every other byte. Each VCLK is now two identical
bytes at a 10 MHz byte rate (VCLK 5 MHz). The doubled ~142 KB stream is
allocated as 38 per-descriptor chunks.
The test sketch now cycles through 12 labelled test images.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The datasheet numbers columns from 1 (Fig. 3: "row 1", "Last pixel
(512 / 256)") and puts odd columns on TVID, so x = 0 (column 1) now
goes to TVID and x = 1 to VID; the encoder had them swapped.
README wiring now lists the J1/J2 pins and power rails from Table 1,
the 5 V buffer, and a pull-down on ENABLE so the panel stays off while
the ESP32 boots without VCLK. encodeRow() documents its T4/T5 margins.
docs/README.md open items are regrouped into done, hardware checks and
software work. main.cpp counts seconds, not frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The datasheet (docs/datasheet, Planar 020-0354-00A) is now stated as the
source of truth. Two-bit mode is PS1 jumper 2 (DCONFIG) removed
(Table 3), not a generic "mode jumper". The README timing table now lists
the Table 5/6 limits beside our values, and the notes add T1-T8, the
8 ns setup/hold from Figure 4 and the input levels from Table 4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
startI2S() sets up I2S0 in 8-bit parallel (LCD) mode at 5 MHz
(PLL_D2 160 MHz / 32, BCK div 1), routes stream bits 0..3 to
VID/TVID/HS/VS via I2S0O_DATA_OUT16+n and BCK to VCLK, and loops
DMA over an 18-descriptor chain of whole lines. stopI2S() stops TX,
returns the pins to GPIO low and frees the chain.
encodeRow() now stores clock c at c ^ 2 to match the 8-bit mode
byte order (bytes 2, 3, 0, 1 per word, as in bitluni's ESP32Lib).
Builds with no warnings; not yet checked on hardware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PlatformIO skeleton (esp32dev, Arduino, Adafruit GFX) with a local EL512
library: EL512Panel (1 bpp framebuffer, two-bit-mode row encoder, I2S DMA
refresh stub) and EL512_GFX (Adafruit_GFX subclass). Adds a test sketch,
pin map, README with wiring and timing, and moves the datasheet to
docs/datasheet/.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
mangavalkandClaude Opus 5.5