I've had my head buried in modern LED-illuminated digital panels, so it was a good change of pace to switch gears to old school CRTs for a bit. Several months have passed since I added animated GIF support to my ESP_8_BIT_Composite video out Arduino library for ESP32 microcontrollers. I opened up the discussion forum option for my GitHub repository and a few items have been raised, sadly I haven't been able to fulfill the requests ranging from NTSC-J support (I don't have a corresponding TV) to higher resolutions (I don't know how). But one has just dropped in my lap, and it was something I can do.

Issue #21 was a request for the library to implement Adafruit GFX capability to rotate display orientation. When I first looked at rotation, I had naively thought Adafruit GFX would handle that above drawPixel() level and I won't need to write any logic for it. This turned out to be wrong: my code was expected to check rotation and alter coordinate space accordingly. I looked at the big CRT TV I had sitting on my workbench and decided I wasn't going to sit that beast on its side, and then promptly forgot about it until now. Whoops.

Looking into Adafruit's generic implementation of drawPixel(), I saw a code fragment that I could copy:

  int16_t t;
  switch (rotation) {
  case 1:
    t = x;
    x = WIDTH - 1 - y;
    y = t;
    break;
  case 2:
    x = WIDTH - 1 - x;
    y = HEIGHT - 1 - y;
    break;
  case 3:
    t = x;
    x = y;
    y = HEIGHT - 1 - t;
    break;
  }

Putting this into my own drawPixel() was a pretty straightforward way to handle rotated orientations. But I had overridden several other methods for the sake of performance, and they needed to be adapted as well. I had drawFastVLine, drawFastHLine, and fillRect, each optimized for their specific scenario with minimal overhead. But now the meaning of a vertical or horizontal line has become ambiguous.

Looking over at what it would take to generalize the vertical or horizontal line drawing code, I realized they have become much like fillRect(). So instead of three different functions, I only need to make fillRect() rotation aware. Then my "fast vertical line" routine can call into fillRect() with a width of one, and similarly my "fast horizontal line" routine calls into fillRect() with a height of one. This invokes some extra computing overhead relative to before, but now the library is rotation aware and I have less code to maintain. A tradeoff I'm willing to make.

While testing behavior of this new code, I found that Adafruit GFX library uses different calls when rendering text. Text size of one uses drawPixel() for single-pixel manipulation. For text sizes larger than one, they switch to using fillRect() to draw more of the screen at a time. I wrote a program to print text at all four orientations, each at three different sizes, to exercise both code paths. It has been added to the collection of code examples as GFX_RotatedText.

Satisfied that my library now supports screen rotation, I published it as version 1.3.0. But that turned out to be incomplete, as I neglected to update the file library.properties.