In the esk8 community, there’s probably nothing where you can be as creative as with you choice of remote. It’s the only thing you’re interacting with your whole rides, so you want a reliable, good looking, good feeling remote. There are solid and cheap options like the Nano or Mini remote - the market is growing fast. People invented their own remotes, including small displays in order to view telemetry info while riding. New safety and control features were introduced. Now, even the Chinese remotes come with displays, light control and whatsoever.
But to this point, there is no flawless remote. And to be honest, there will never be such a remote, we can only come closer and closer to a perfect remote. So why don’t take another step?
To this point, all remotes available use OLEDs. Their suited for this application. They’re rather compact are very bright and consume very little energy. Most often, you will get across white or blue OLEDs and I for my self really like both. There’s also blue yellow OLEDs used by flipsky in their VX2 remote, but in my oppinion, yellow really isn’t the color to use for your battery or clock or really anything. So why should you limit yourself to two colors?
And that is how all this started. I looked up on AliExpress and found various OLED displays, although the selection of RGB capable ones is much smaller. As the trend in basically every part of life is going bigger on everything (cars, phones, the list goes on), the Firefly for example had a 128x32 display to start of, which is now replaced by the Firefly Nano with a 128x64 display. The idea behind it seems to be trivial - more space to display more data with better readability. The next step would be a 128x128 display, and luckily there is a 1.5 inch display (44,5mm x 39,5mm) with the SSD1331 driver which allows for the use of the wonderful Adafruit GFX library. This library makes GUI writing so easy, I learned it in half a day. Here’s my first try with a 128x32 monochrome OLED:
The RGB OLED has a maximum current draw of 70mA, the common power draw is lower obviously. You can also decrease the power consumption by changing the OLEDs brightness, which you can in 256 steps.
So, what’s the point of the thread after all this?
Well, until now, remotes were built by individual people. I really respect the effort and work of everyone that made his own remote, but obviously you are limiting yourself by doing everything on your own. By splitting work in an open source project, you maximize the work efficiency and the end result.
As you can probably already tell, my question is, what you guys think about this display for a remote. By the way, I would use the Firefly Nano as a base for everything. So I would a Lora 32 as the heart of the project. One thing the Chinese did good, is the display position on the VX2. You don’t have to twist your hand in order to read values. Going faster than 40km/h you don’t want to have problems reading something on your remote, do you?
My second question is, if anyone here would be interested in taking part in this project. This are needed skills:
- Shell designers
- Programmers for backend
- GUI designers (I would lead this with pleasure)
Here are the main points of the new remote that’s in my head:
- 128 x 128 RGB OLED 1.5 inch with Adafruit GFX lib
- use the awesome and compact Heltec Lora 32 (one without the display)
- use the awesome code of the Firefly Nano
- make a new shell
- probably top mount the OLED (size is 44,5mm x 39,5mm)
- remote eco mode (lower brightness)
- maybe add a rotary encoder for menu usage
Please share your thoughts using the comment function and the surveys 
- Wow, a bigger display!
- Not a big fan of it…
0 voters
- I want a RGBible
- Monochrome is enough for me
0 voters
- Crush your thumb to turn a wheel
- I like gun triggers
0 voters
- Lora 32
- Other
0 voters
- Top mount
- Side mount
0 voters
- Rotary encoder
- Buttons
- Nothing
0 voters
Here’s a brief explanation of the GUI:
At the top of the display, you can see arrows, similar to the ones on your mobile phone. Here, they tell you if you’re remote is connected to the receiver currently. No arrows mean something is not working correctly.
Then we have a clock, I hope you all know what this is.
In the top right corner is a Battery Indicator for the remote itself, with the battery percentage next to it. The Battery Indicator behaves like on your mobile phone. Less battery means less filled Battery Indicator. Less than 20% will make the Battery Indicator red (normally its just white).
Then, we have two bar graphs on the left side of the display. They’re blue and orange by default, but you can change this to your prefered color of course. The blue graph shows your current throttle. Positive values will make the blue graph bigger, going from bottom to top. When braking, the graph is going from top to bottom.
Here’s an example picture to help explain:
In the middle of the display, you have your standard telemetry data, namely:
- Speed
- Battery Voltage
- Battery %
- Distance
I’ll add a screen about power draw etc. in near future too.
On the right, there’s a small compass for aesthetics and to guide you if your phone dies.
– in work - -
