I had an epiphany after a few weeks of working on this weather calendar. It seems that the routine which works on CPython implementations (such as those running on Linux, Mac) and drives the ESP01 ESP8266 chip well, does not work so great when running on the embedded MicroPython.

I’d used a library which worked really great when operating the display remotely with the ESP01 driving it. That formatted the commands correctly and got the display to respond well. However on running this on the various MicroPython devices such as the Adafruit Feather Huzzah or the WiPy the display refused to respond, and on reading the Rx pin was sending “Error:20” back on each command.

The epiphany occurred when I saw the number of characters written to the output Tx pin:

------
A5000900CC33C33C - string
b'\xa5\x00\t\x00\xcc3\xc3<' - unhexlify of string
------
¥ Ì3Ã<¬ - string through H2B routine
b'c2a5000900c38c33c3833cc2ac' - hexlify dump of that
------
13 - size of output written to Rx pin
b'Error:20'

That second last line should have been ‘9’, as that was the packed byte length of the command plus parity bit. For some reason the routine in that library called H2B was putting an extraneous ‘c2’ at the start, plus some extra insertions in the middle and end.

I investigated and it seems that the binascii module will provide some of the same function, in particular the hexlify/unhexlify calls which pack hex representation into bytes, just want I want. Luckily those two calls are implemented in MicroPython, although others are not. If I can iterate the string and build a parity bit okay then I think I can build the correct commands needed by the display and drive it from a local Huzzah or WiPy device!

Still not out of the woods yet, by asking on the MicroPython forum why the leading ‘A5’ was converted into two characters it was helpfully pointed out that in hex that was 165 decimal, and I should use a byte string instead. That worked!

Last issue is how to convert between string commands which need parity bytes, and encoding these as byte strings without conversion and I will have cracked this one.