Make drivers usable on devices with little RAM

[mgottschlag]

I want to use the library on a microcontroller with 16KiB SRAM, with the 400x300 pixel 4.2 inch display. The library, however, requires a full frame buffer of 400x300x1bit = 15000Byte, almost as much as the available RAM.

I would suggest the following interface to stream data into the library:

/// Iterator which streams pixels.
///
/// This type removes the need for a full screen buffer and allows usage on very memory-constrained
/// devices such as small microcontrollers.
pub trait DisplayStream {
    /// Returns the next section of pixels.
    fn next<'a>(&'a mut self) -> Option<&'a [u8]>;
}

to be used with a corresponding function in the WaveshareDisplay trait:

/// Transmit a full frame to the SRAM of the EPD from a streaming iterator
fn update_frame_stream<S: DisplayStream>(
    &mut self,
    spi: &mut SPI,
    stream: S,
) -> Result<(), SPI::Error>;

Do you think such an interface would make sense? The implementation in the driver is trivial (I'd add a stream() function to the interface, to replace the data() call previously used to transmit all the data to the display). The old full-buffer interface could even internally be implemented as an iterator returning a single element. However, I'd have to test whether that negatively impacts code size.

If you think that's a good idea, I'd try to clean my code up a bit to create a first draft for further review.

[caemor]

I think you could try that. There might be a problem to use this together with the embedded_graphics library.

Another solution would be to use a variable sized display (see examples/epd4in2_variable_size), which I also added for that purpose to still work together with the embedded_graphics stuff.

[mgottschlag]

Unfinished commit: mgottschlag@fc18e6f

I just noticed that this is really unnecessary for my application, though. It is more efficient to partition the display into 2 or 4 parts and use partial updates for those parts. Only on devices with very little RAM would such an interface make sense to reduce the overhead of frequent refresh window settings.