Cost effective displays for digital products

Moddable is working hard to make it much easier to add displays to consumer electronics products. A display shows more information quickly and concisely than a few blinking lights or a voice interface. But, it is challenging today to build a product with a display at a reasonable cost with a modern user interface.

One challenge is a lack of information. To help address that, we’ve built a web page with information about a dozen different displays that are compatible with the Moddable SDK. For most displays on the page you’ll find:

  • Video of the display working with the Moddable SDK
  • Example application source code
  • Driver documentation
  • Wiring diagram
  • Sources for breakout boards

Most importantly the information referenced by this page distills our knowledge and experience about pairing displays with low cost microcontrollers to provide the foundation for a better user experience on digital products. Check it out and please let us know what you think.

Moddable is addressing the challenge on many other fronts as well:

  • Support for a wide variety of different display types because each product has unique requirements
  • Support for rendering on low cost microcontrollers with very little memory and no hardware graphics acceleration
  • High quality, flicker-free graphics using our Poco rendering engine
  • Tools to process graphics for optimal rendering on the target device
  • Tools to compress graphics to minimize storage space
  • JavaScript development environment, ideal for user interface work
  • Smooth animation using familiar timeline-style API
  • Modern user interface framework, Piu, for building complex applications
  • Source code for tools and runtime available on our Github repository
  • Lots of documentation and examples
  • An inexpensive pre-built development device, Moddable Zero