I've made several projects with Arduinos, and for my latest project, I decided to buy a 128x64 LCD (not OLED) from China. With previous LCDs, they always took care of the hard stuff for you. They had a separate chip on board (probablynot a shift register, but an MCU - thanks. that allows you to communicate via serial, and you only needed 2 pins to do it. This time, though, it's just a screen, and I have no idea how to use it.
Obviously, this is now beyond my skill level, so my question is how can I make this thing work with fewer pins? I plan on attaching this to a project on an Uno, so I need to reduce the number of pins this screen will take up.
I'm not asking you to do my homework for me, though. I really do want to learn more about whatever I need to know to make this work, so if you can suggest some reading, or other similar projects where someone explains how this is done, that would be greatly appreciated.
After all the projects I've done with Arduino, I really want to get into more advanced stuff, so I figured this would be a good first step towards learning more about what's going on behind the black curtain, so to speak. I've never really dug into library files, and I've only done a few small analog electronics projects, so I'm hoping this will be a good stepping stone to getting there.
When I got my degree we did not learn how to read data sheets. You just had to figure it out yourself. Make no mistake about it, finding, reading and understanding data sheets is an important part of "low level" engineering. As for finding a library somewhere on the internet and blindly using it may work at some companies and others absolutely not.
If you want to pursue embedded design and programming you probably want to get away from the Arduino software platform and start coding in straight C or C++ using the development tools from Atmel.search in your state with the keyword "arduino". 0 hits in my state. Then search on "embedded". Dozens of hits pop up.
Just to learn, I've taken a few components that I use (chips, mainly) and for which I had a library, and started to figure out the datasheet and see how it matches up with the library. For one of them I've rewritten the library, as the one I had was just a bunch of (badly written) functions and wasn't that easy to use, so I made one that works as a class. I specifically did not look at the original library again when I started programming and used the datasheet for that.
Once you've seen enough of those, I suppose you'll get better at it. Some datasheets totally suck though. I still have a lot to learn.
I have to say that the software was the easiest part for me as I'm a software developer, but even if you aren't it'd be another chance to learn.
Sometimes there are tutorials too that explain a lot more than just how to use it.
