CH552 Drivers: SSD1306 Display Driver - Part 3

Now that we have a solid library for rendering tiles and sprites, it's time for some higher level stuff. I would like to get to the scrolling functions, but I feel like that's a special function that won't get used a lot, while rendering text to the screen is likely to be the most common use of a monochrome display of this size. We will put off the scrolling functions once again and instead focus on making a font and providing a mechanism for printing text to the screen.

The font itself will be fairly simple. I've written a tutorial for developing an 8x8 monochrome sprite editor in Python. If you want to make it for yourself (or copy/paste the code...), I've published it here. You can use that to make 8x8 characters for a font. Once a character is made, you can click the tile version of the data in the top bar (top copy it) and paste that into your C code. You'll need to add commas, but otherwise it's the same formatting as an 8x8 tile. I'm going to provide a font myself so that you don't have to make one, but if you happen to want to customize some characters or even make your own font, you could draft new characters using the sprite editor and then copy/paste them into your program.

You can find the ASCII font I made for this here. Note that this is an ASCII font, not an extended ASCII font, so it only has 128 characters. If you try to display a character past 127, you will end up with a buffer overrun, which will display whatever happens to be in the memory past the end of the font array. (I'll eventually add some full 256 character fonts to that repository, but at the time of writing, that is the only one there.)