Displaying Unicode with MCUs
Intro I grew up in the era of 8-bit computers (late 1970s). At that time, basically anything done on a computer meant it was written in English and text was written using 7-bit ASCII characters stored in 8-bit bytes. It wasn't until a few years later that IBM and Microsoft added support for accented characters to be more inclusive of European languages. The initial solution was to shoehorn a bunch of characters and symbols into the "unused space" of values 128 to 255. This became known as Extended ASCII. There were multiple de-facto standards, but Microsoft's seemed to win; they called it codepage 1252 . This stuck for a while until the various countries got together to create "one character set to rule them all" and called it Unicode. In this new world, the old ASCII 7-bit set was slotted into the first 128 spots followed by the accented characters, symbols and then Asian and middle-eastern characters came after that. There are literally thousands of symbol...