OLED display hat with rotary encoder or buttons for the Rock Pi E

#1

Do you have any plans to develop an OLED display hat for the Rock Pi E with a “Prusa Mini style” rotary encoder or 3 or 4 buttons? After FriendlyARM discontinued their successful Nano Pi NEO2 Complete Kit, there currently is a gap in that segment and opportunity for you to take.

Alternatively, adding an OLED display and buttons directly on top of the PoE hat would be even better.

Here is a couple of mockups. Ideally, Ethernet ports should be oriented towards the person holding it and so should the buttons and display.

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#2

For the record, this would be the ideal display and Ethernet port orientation which would enable us using the board as a handheld device.

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#3

I made something similar for Raspberry Pi Zero

https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/BassFly_uHAT.html

Adapting it for RockPi won’t be a lot of work (I had in mind to do it for RockPi S and release it opensource), but unfortunately I don’t have a RockPi E (only X and S).

If more people are interested in something similar I can think of doing a HAT for both, especially if @radxa a will provide some HW to support

#4

Surely :slight_smile:

We can provide ROCK Pi E to support the HAT development. We can even help to manufacture it here in China and pay royalty/license to you after selling/shipping it.

1 Like
#5

That would be great!

Later on I will contact you in private for proceeding the discussion

#6

Thank you @Darmur and @jack, that’s great news :+1:

We like the Rock Pi S form factor, but we require a true 1 Gbps Ethernet (think ~970 Mbps or so) on our board. So from this perspective, Rock Pi S is not the right solution for us.

The Rock Pi E looks really promising. With a display, buttons and PoE hat it should deliver most of the features we need. To give you visibility of our plans and roadmap, we will most likely start looking for 802.11ax Wi-Fi adapters and connected via M.2 slot. It would be great if you introduced this on one of the future Rock Pi boards.

Please keep us posted. We are happy to provide any feedback or test samples. Happy to jump on a quick video call and chat.

#7

could you please give a sort of requirement list for the HAT?

for example number of push-buttons, number of LEDs, etc.

#8

Hi All. Just joining the conversation here, I’m on the team with Jiri that’s driving this project. I’ve been playing around with a hat design in KiCad and would love to be collaborative on this process.

@jack as we think about design/development do you have a supported list of parts that are easy to use/cheap/already tooled that we can reference? I want to make sure we aren’t making design decisions on parts that are hard for you to source, are prohibitively expensive, or downright couldn’t be used.

@Darmur Jiri shared a 3d rendering you did for the “S” model. I haven’t found a footprint for the OLED for my work so far, did you create that yourself? I’d love to be able to use that for my stuff if you are willing to share or can point me in the right direction.

#9

Hi!

That’s great, I also use Kicad for my designs (both personal projects and for daily job). I would like to give my support for this project, if you want we can collaborate on the design.

I’ve found the 3D model some time ago searching on internet, I can share it with you, no problem!

#10

small update

HAT with OLED display and buttons is ready, I’m waiting for some samples to test

I’ve also added some other peripherals requested by WLANPi team

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#11

Great work, Dario :+1:t2: Thank you.