Colour OLEDS

Peter ScargillOLED, SSD130619 Comments on Colour OLEDS

OLEDJust in case you were wondering about those pretty two-colour OLEDS we see on Ebay etc..

It would seem they are not QUITE compatible with the normal single colour ones – if you look at the photo on the right, it simply looks like they’ve split board to have yellow LEDS on the top bit and blue on the rest… but in fact there is also a GAP at least one pixel high between the yellow and blue areas..

Colour OLEDJust so you’re aware. It looks like the first area is a maximum 15 pixels high… with the second area started at 16.

And that’s ok – caught me out at first 🙂

You’ll see a comment in here about them lasting maybe 15,000 hours – i.e. 2 years running night and day. Anyone any experience of this – does dimming them help?

19 thoughts on “Colour OLEDS”

  1. I bought one some time ago.
    When i started playing with it I realised why all the photos had only yellow on top and blue at the bottom. (I expected blue/yellow at the whole screen).
    It was dirt cheap so still worth the price.

  2. I avoided burning pixels simply by inverting the displayed contnent. I also use a tiny ultra low power PIR module form eBay to trigger the whole unit with display on only if it detects somebody in front of the unit. Works fine for at least 3 years now without any sign of degradation.

    1. Hmm, I have a £1 radar module I could fit behind the display.. but then that means another control pin… hmm. Need a solution that doesn’t use another pin. However it does look like we need to assume these things don’t last forever. Mind you at the price you could just replace them every couple of years 🙂

        1. You’d have to reinitialise after the power was applied to the OLED and you would not know if it was needed. Sensor really needs to go at the controller end and have that turn off the display LEDs – but then we’re back to using another wire… Still – in some cases that isn’t an issue.

  4. OLED are most influenced by temperature (you can influence that) and the quality of their encapsulation (depends of the quality of the OLED).
    To lower the temperature dim the panel, put it away from any heatsource (sun, heating, etc.).
    Another idea is to shift the pixels of the display slightly. This helps because each OLED-Pixel emits light (and therefore heat) by itself. So the Pixel has a way lower average temperature and the pixels are used more evenly. Kind of “pixel wear leveling” 🙂

    I recently did a school lecture about OLEDs 🙂

    1. In the shade, turning pixels on (text not graphics) makes very little difference to the surface temperature of the display – unlike an LCD where the backlight usually considerably warms up the display.

    1. But too expensive to consider – the 180×240 LCDs are way better deal compared to that price.

  6. make me think at the first arcade games when the monochrome crt was actually covered with different colored transparent bands to delimitate the areas 😀
    i’ve a xiaomi miband 2, and they have a different approach: when you turn your wrist as you was looking at it, the display turn on for about 5 seconds… so actual ON time is very limited, and they last at least 2 or 3 weeks…

  7. Just note that these OLEDs have a relatively short lifetime and when displaying repeated information will slowly degrade and “burn out” …
    The number I find on Wikipedia is 15k hours

    1. I had a feeling they did – maybe that’s why they’re so cheap… still 15k hours… that’s 2 years 24/7… I wonder what happens if you dim them… having them run partial brilliance until a button is pressed would be easy…

      1. I have one that has been running for about 18 months 24/7 displaying a series of water temperatures; there are clearly “burned” out parts of digits that didn’t change regularly.

        Now I’m looking for an inexpensive “proximity sensor” that would turn on the display only when somebody is close enough to actually read it.

        1. Well now Christ that is good, hard information… so we need to consider in all of our designs how to make this cute, inexpensive displays last longer – thankfully there is no backlight to consider – it is merely a case of ensuring that any one pixel does not get over-used…

          Hmmm.

Comments are closed.