search

adafruit / Adafruit_CircuitPython_SharpMemoryDisplay

CircuitPython library for SHARP Memory monochrome displays
MIT License
9 stars 12 forks source link

Limit the number of writes to improve performance #22

Closed grouma closed 2 years ago

grouma commented 2 years ago

The current dispaly.show() command is very slow and takes roughly a second to complete. I discovered from this thread that it's likely due to the Linux scheduler limiting how fast one can send data to the SPI hardware. To overcome this issue we now do a single write command. This significantly improves the performance which makes for a nearly instant screen response.

This resolves https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_SharpMemoryDisplay/issues/18

grouma commented 2 years ago

Didn't test, but this all looks pretty reasonable to me

I was able to run some experiments. Before this change I got about 1 fps on my Raspberry Pi Zero W. With this change I get about 14 fps. It's a lot better but still isn't great given the actual power of the board. It'd be great if there was an easy to install library that unlocked the whole performance of the display. Something like: https://github.com/wrobell/smemlcd

tekktrik commented 2 years ago

Always happy to look at PRs! And I think your changes fixed the original issue, but the CI is having it's own hiccups with the new move to Python 3.11. I'm going to leave this here for just a bit to see if we can quickly resolve that but I'm pretty sure there's nothing else on your end!

ilikecake commented 1 year ago

Oh Hey, I am glad someone made this change. I kept meaning to get back to this but life keeps getting in the way. :) if you are running on a Raspberry Pi and have not already tried it, add Numpy to your installation. I made another small change that speeds up the image function if Numpy is present. See here for details.