U8G2 VCV Example

A VCV Rack plugin demonstrating how to use the u8g2_vcv library to render realistic monochrome OLED displays inside VCV Rack modules.

Example.mov

What it does

This plugin provides a single example module that cycles through a series of drawing demos on a photorealistic 0.96" SSD1306 OLED board widget, including:

• Shapes (boxes, circles, rounded rectangles, triangles, lines)
• Text rendering in multiple directions
• ASCII character maps
• Unicode symbols
• Bitmap drawing with different blend modes (black, white, XOR, transparent)

About u8g2_vcv

The u8g2_vcv library brings the u8g2 monochrome display API to VCV Rack. It lets you reuse existing Arduino/u8g2 display code almost verbatim while getting:

• A photorealistic SSD1306 board widget with blue PCB, mounting holes, FPC ribbon, and I2C header pins
• Gaussian-blur glow that responds to VCV Rack's halo brightness setting
• Display rotation (0/90/180/270 degrees) and mirror modes
• Double-buffered rendering for thread-safe updates
• Full u8g2 font compatibility (~1900 fonts)

Building

Prerequisites

• VCV Rack SDK (2.4.0+) installed at ~/Rack-SDK
• CMake 3.16+
• C++17 compiler

Clone

git clone --recursive https://github.com/colingimenez/U8G2_VCV_Example.git
cd U8G2_VCV_Example

Build

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

The built plugin (plugin.dylib / plugin.so / plugin.dll) will be in the build/ directory. The build_plugin_quick_install target copies the plugin and plugin.json directly into your Rack plugins folder for quick testing.