I’ve always used and recommended AMOLED type displays for astronomy device displays. Not needing a backlight their contrast is very high and their black is absolutely black. Great for dark adaptation and very readable. I use a Samsung tab A2 tablet to run SkySafari while observing as it has an excellent AMOLED display panel.
Recently AMOLED display modules have become available and affordable for the diy market. A 5” display with 900x544 resolution and touch control from Waveshare looked interesting so I decided to build an eFinder with one of these displays ‘built in’.
This coincided with my receipt of one of the first Raspberry Pi5’s to be delivered in the UK. This new model looks very similar to the previous, but is very fast. Initial testing showed it would plate solve x3 quicker (ie about 0.6 seconds). It needs the new Bookworm OS and this I found requires a more structured approach to its set up (virtual environments) plus it had a few bugs!
The AMOLED display really needed a new eFinder GUI display to make the most of its potential. This turned out to be quite a rewrite, but I took the opportunity to make it more user friendly and slicker.
Photo to the right is the display connected to a Pi4 during evaluation.
Below is the finished new GUI running. The photo makes the star image background look brighter than it is to the eye. Next job is to put it in a box.
