It may be a way to achieve some data compression for a monochrome bit map display image. Using RLE coding for the counts of black and white pixels along horizontal rasters would certainly save storage space if the image was significantly more than 50% black OR more than significantly more than 50% white. Also if there were lots of areas where there are many adjacent pixels that are the same color then RLE could save space in a compressed image of the bitmap.

You could evaluate this easily by placing a sample version of the display data into a Windows bitmap file on your PC and then write a simple program that opened the file and read the bitmap into the program performed the compression. Making this program could easily be done in VB6 or even VC++ in VIsual Studio. It could also write the compressed output to a source file format so that compressed image data can then be assembled or compiled into your 8051 project.

Michael Karas