m5 lcd display free sample

BASIC is a cost-effective entry-level IoT main controller. It adopts Espressif ESP32 chipset, equipped with 2 low-power Xtensa® 32-bit LX6 microprocessors with main frequency up to 240MHz. Built-in 16M FLASH memory, integrated 2.0-inch full-color HD IPS display panel, speaker, TFCard slot and other peripherals. The full-coverage housing ensures circuit stability even in complex industrial applications. Internal provides a variety interface resources (ADC/DAC/I2C/UART/SPI, etc.) and 15x IO pins at the bottom, which is highly developable. Ideal for a variety of product prototyping, industrial control, intelligent building application.High productization:Exquisite designs, Prototyping right into products

I recently purchased an M5StickC after noticing a number of projects posted online using the M5StickC and M5Stick Plus. The two different models are similar. The M5Stick Plus has some additional features, including a slightly larger LCD display.

The M5StickC is a 48x24x14 mm plastic brick that contains an ESP32, a 80x160 pixel LCD display, a USB port for programming, three buttons, and an eight-pin header socket with power and three GPIO pins brought out. There are also a number of additional features inside.

To get acquainted with this device, I purchased a package from Amazon that included a wrist watch strap. eBay has lots of offers as well. My initial interest came from an online article describing how to use the M5StickC to do bed leveling on a 3D printer. The article can be found at https://www.instructables.com/3D-Print-Bed-Leveling-Tool-Using-M5StickC.

A force sensitive resistor (FSR) is connected through the header pin socket and the pressure between the 3D printer nozzle and print bed is measured and displayed on the LCD.

The M5Stack website contains a large number of “HATs” which are small sensors or devices that can be interfaced to the M5StickC by plugging them into the header socket.

So, along with the sensors and other devices already embedded in the M5StickC, additional connections from the ESP32 to other components are possible. There’s a lot of potential here for robot builders.

To experiment with the ESP32 in the M5StickC, I wrote a program that turns it into a wrist watch. Digital clocks are an area I’ve done lots of programming in and so was an easy project to experiment with and learn the M5StickC.

No additional hardware was added to the M5StickC and I used the Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) for programming. My main interest was in testing the ESP32 connection to the Internet, using the buttons, and writing to the LCD display.

If you want to duplicate my efforts, here are some resources you’ll need. I like the Arduino IDE and so chose this method to program the M5StickC. It can also be programmed in MicroPython and with the M5Stack’s UIFlow, a graphic coding IDE. A free UIFlow download is available on the M5Stack website at https://m5stack.com/pages/download. If you need to install the Arduino IDE on your computer, you can find a guide at https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide.

Once the M5Stack library is installed, you’ll have access to many example programs for the M5StickC. I strongly encourage referring to these examples. I did find some online examples of software for the M5StickC that have errors; notably in the use of the buttons. The example code provided me with the correct use of the buttons.

Here’s the main loop portion of the program. It makes extensive use of the M5Stack library. The complete program can be found in the article downloads.

I found reading the buttons a little different. When you use the M5.BtnB.isPressed() method, you must first call the M5.update() method. Pressing the large button A turns the LCD on and then gets the weather information.

Pressing button B fills the screen with the black background and then does a Wi-Fi connect. The main loop portion of the program mainly contains M5 method calls to software objects provided in the included M5Stack library, making it fairly easy to program.

The program works quite well but there are a couple of caveats. First, the 80 milliamp hour battery does not give you enough battery life. To get the watch through a day, you need to turn the LCD display off for most of the time when using it. When the seconds hits 1 or 31, the program turns off the display.

There’s a large amount of online discussion about lowering the power consumption of the M5StickC. I didn’t attempt to further reduce power consumption.

Second, the Internet connectivity goes through your local wireless router, so the program needs your SSID and password to access the router. Unlike your phone, this device does not have a cell connection to the Internet, so once you’re away from your router, it can’t connect to the Internet. When this happens, the program changes the display color from blue to red. Take a look at Figure 8.

Because there’s an embedded RTC in the M5StickC, it will continue to keep time even when the Internet connection is lost. In the setup portion of the program, the time is obtained from the Network Time Protocol server, but after that, it isn’t accessed again and the RTC takes over the timekeeping function.

My overall impression of the M5StickC is very positive. I see it as a useful component in robot construction or data acquisition and reporting. For long time use, it’s easy enough to add something like a five volt power supply through either the USB connection (probably the best way) or the header plug.

I spent some time experimenting with the IMU unit in the M5StickC and found it has some real potential for use in robotics. It does need calibration and the yaw values do drift quite a bit. Using just the pitch and roll values on something like a robotic arm will give information on its orientation in space.

The following is the example IMU program provided with the M5Stack library with additional output I added, so you can view its reaction on the serial plotter feature of the Arduino IDE:

The M5StickC is the most compact ESP32 platform around and, in addition, contains a respectable number of connected components already built in. If you haven’t used the ESP32 before, here’s an excellent way to begin experimenting. SV

It takes the same time for the hardware to implement lcd.clear() for a 16x2 or a 20x4 screen. i.e. about 2ms whether by parallel or backpack. It also resets the cursor to 0, 0.

My project I preferred to develop with Visual Studio Code and the Arduino extension. For the sensors I basically used all the Adafruit libraries and the ones supplied by M5Stack Core2.

You see, after using the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii solidly for a month whilst traveling in Europe, I am confident that this little camera is one of the best travel cameras available today.

Despite the emergence of many other great micro-four-thirds cameras over the years since the release of this, the OM-D E-M5 Mark II continues to be one of my favourites.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii allows you to take interesting and creative photos much easier than any other camera I’ve ever used. It makes photography easier and it makes it a lot of fun.

If you have $1,000 to invest in a compact camera that has better functions than any DSLR and excellent image quality, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is the camera to get.

I wasn’t expecting to like the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii. I’ve tried plenty of mirrorless cameras, and they all seem to annoy me, usually in one important aspect – the autofocus.

Rather than bore you with an in-depth review of every detail of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, I’ve decided to highlight what are in my opinion the most amazing features of this camera.

I think this makes the review more realistic, and hopefully shows what you can achieve with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii as a travel camera in an everyday situation.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii allows you to change lenses. There are lots of lens options available, but I chose the excellent Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm f/1.8 which balances perfectly on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii.

As for the weight, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii + the Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm f/1.8 is 648g (467g + 181g). By comparison, the average dSLR + lens is well over 1kg.

When I got hold of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, I knew that the body would blow the Fuji out of the water. It just felt right in my hands. However, I thought that the image quality would fall short.

You may think the above photo looks a bit orange, but the afternoon light in Tuscany really is that colour – it’s beautiful. The Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii nailed the white balance.

I shoot the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii on the RAW + JPEG Fine setting. That way I don’t have to waste my time editing any RAW files if I’m happy with how the JPEG looks, but I still have the RAW files to fall back on should I need to dig deeper into the dynamic range of the file, or fix the white balance.

However, if you accept this, the RAW files out of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii are excellent and you can have a lot of fun post processing them in Lightroom or Photoshop.

The original Olympus OM-D EM-5 had a 90 degree flip out screen, but the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii allows the screen to be flipped and swivelled 180 degrees.

When you try it in person though, it’ll blow your mind! It really does make every other touch screen camera seem dated in comparison, and also makes the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii very easy to use for anyone.

This is pretty much the main reason why I think the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is the best camera for street photography. After all, being invisible is the name of the game if you want to get those decisive moments.

Whether you use the touch screen or the brilliant Electronic View Finder (i.e. looking through the ‘eye hole’ like you would a regular camera), the focus on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is nothing short of amazing.

In fact, the auto focus on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii in good light is just as fast, if not faster than a dSLR, which for such a small camera, I find mindblowing.

On small cameras, the fewer the number of button presses needed to take the photo, the better, and with helpful functions like Face Recognition on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, taking a photograph of a person is made so simple.

The 5 axis stabilisation on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is truly remarkable, allowing you to handhold photos much slower than the reciprocal rule (the reciprocal rule means for example, if you’re using a 50mm lens, setting your shutter speed to any slower than 1/50 will most likely result in a blurry photo if you are hand holding the camera.)

Looking at the LCD screen whilst recording and walking along is mind blowing – every step you take is muffled into a smooth motion right before your eyes, making you feel like you’re gliding.

Although I rarely ever shoot video on holidays, the stabilisation function on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii made it so much fun (and the output so professional looking), that I found myself hitting the record button between shooting stills more and more often.

What this means in practice is that rather than simply guessing (or calculating) the exposure length required for a low light photo, you can start the exposure (i.e. press the shutter button), then watch on the LCD screen as the photo gradually changes, until the point where you feel happy with how it looks, at which point you can press the shutter button again to take the picture.

To be able to create a photo with so much data, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii needs to stitch together a few photos, which means that the subject needs to be completely static for the length of the exposure. This means you’ll mostly be using it for landscape work on a very still day.

For those rare times when the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii struggles to achieve focus (usually in the dark), it’s great to be able to fall back on a manual focus system that’s executed in the best way I’ve ever seen on a camera.

Many compact cameras offer Focus Peaking as a feature, but the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii allows you to engage it faster and easier than anything else I’ve used.

Using the LCD screen, it makes getting the exposure I want very easy – if the picture looks too dark, I roll the rear dial one way, too light the other way.

Even if you’re a Canon shooter, or more used to dials being placed elsewhere, the layout of the main dials/buttons on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is excellent and you’ll feel like you’re using a larger, professional camera body.

I can only fit 3 fingers and a thumb on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, which would normally rule it out, but due to one small addition, I feel comfortable using this camera and 100% confident that it will never slip out of my hand.

I think the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii looks great. I prefer the look of my Fujifilm X100s, but that’s at the detriment to its ergonomic functionality.

Let’s face it. No camera is perfect. There are always going to be things we don’t like, and here’s the list of the things that pissed me off about the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii:

However, with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, there’s no way to set this minimum shutter speed, meaning that instead of the Auto ISO increasing the ISO for you, it’ll drop the shutter speed first instead.

Whilst viewing photos during playback, the EVF (viewfinder)’s sensor will activate if you hold your hand too close. What’s happening here is the viewfinder is optionally set up to detect your eye’s presence (i.e., when you want to look through the EVF rather than the LCD screen), but is actually just sensing any object that’s close, like your hand.

As I’m predominantly a dSLR user, I’m used to a camera being ready to shoot the moment you switch it on. However, with MOST non dSLR cameras, this is not the case, in part, I assume, due to the fact that there are LCD screens to activate and other electronics.

My workaround was to keep the camera turned on constantly, and hold my thumb over the viewfinder sensor, thus deactivating the LCD and preserving battery life. When I wanted to take a pic, I’d just remove my thumb and snap snap, I’d be done.

In general, the button layout on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is fine. I’ve mentioned how I love the dials already, and the thumb pad for focus point selection is easy to use even with the camera to your eye.

It works… sometimes. This is an area most mirrorless cameras that use only Contract Detection struggle, so the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii isn’t the only one.

If you’re a parent looking to buy a camera to take photos of your kids and want all the quality of a dSLR without the bulk, look no further – the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii is the camera for you.

If your budget can’t stretch to the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii, I recommend you get its smaller brother, the Olympus OM-D EM-10 Mark II which has just been released. It has all the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark ii’s best features, all packed into a smaller body.