ESP8266-Hack – Piggybacking OLED display on WeMos D1 Mini

Inspired by Mike Rankin’s (@mikerankin) beautiful crossovers between an ESP8266 ESP-01 and an 0.96 Inch OLED I2C display I decided to try if there wasn’t an easy hack to marry the two components with as  little soldering as possible. After turning, connecting and flashing different combinations of the two modules I finally found one that only requires you to solder 4 connections. Assuming that your display’s connectors are in the order GND, VCC, SCL and SDA just place the display on the bottom of your WeMos D1 Mini so that the two GND’s are connected with each other. VCC connects to D4, SCL to D3 and SDA to D2. I’m aware that I am “cheating” the D4 connector into being the power source, but I couldn’t find any data about the max. current the display draws. If you want to be 100% save add a connection between VCC (on the display) and 3V3 instead. Let me know in the comments if you are convinced that I’m doing something reckless.

128x64 OLED display directly soldered on a WeMos D1 Mini

128×64 OLED display directly soldered on a WeMos D1 Mini running the Weather Station Code

128x64 OLED display directly soldered on a WeMos D1 Mini Running the Weather Station Code

WeMos D1 Mini with Piggyback Oled display

If you are following my VCC-D4 hack from above make sure that you enable D4 for output and to set it to HIGH:

pinMode(D4, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(D4, HIGH);

 

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Related:  ESP8266: R.I.P. Long Term Data Logger after almost 3 months.