tabula noun. f.
- Tablet, sometimes a tablet covered with wax for writing
- board or plank

Introduction

Tabula is an integrated e-paper display solution that bridges the gap between hardware drivers and desktop design tools. Built on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller and the UC8159 display controller, it drives a 7.5-inch Black/White/Red e-paper panel. The accompanying Qt desktop suite features a built-in rendering engine identical to the firmware, providing a pixel-perfect environment for design verification.

The system architecture is modular; if your display is incompatible with the UC8159, you can adapt the solution by modifying the relevant codec and driver layers.

Implemented Features

Firmware

• UC8159 Driver: Core display driver implementation.
• Main Logic: Application state machine and control flow.
• Image Display: Full-frame buffer rendering pipeline.
• Calendar: RTC integration and calendar widget logic.
• Connectivity: WiFi and Bluetooth stack integration.

Graphics Layer

• Native Codec: 2bpp native format handling.
• Compressed Codec: 4bpp compressed planes format decoding.
• Primitives: Drawing support for pixels, lines, rectangles, and fill operations.
• Rotation: Coordinate transformation for rotated rendering.
• Font Engine: Glyph rasterization and text rendering.
• Bitmap Rendering: Support for external bitmap assets.
• Dithering: Image dithering algorithms (e.g., Floyd-Steinberg) for 3-color displays.

Qt Desktop Client

• Design Verification: WYSIWYG preview tools with simulation.
• Device Communication: USB/WiFi data synchronization protocol with the MCU.