raspberry pi lcd module quotation

some jokes (dark jokes preferably, because I"m a horrible human being) displayed from JokeApi. I basically copied the example script and started from there.

Maker Conor O"Hanlon has shared a build guide for a Raspberry Pi Zero-powered motivational message dispenser, which uses an ePaper display to keep the power draw and desk glare down.

"The Covid-19 pandemic has been hard for everyone. Why not give yourself a break and create this unique Raspberry Pi Zero project," O"Hanlon writes by way of introduction. "This motivational quote bot will display a new quote every hour. It sits on my desk and gets me through the day."

The project is built around a Pi Zero W, which includes an on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio, connected to a Waveshare 2.13" ePaper Display HAT—an add-on that connects via the Raspberry Pi"s general-purpose input/output (GPIO) port and provides a small, low-power electrophoretic display panel.

first of all let me say that I dont have any experience with a Raspberry, Arduino etc. at all, and also dont own any equipment yet. This is more a general question to the more experienced members here, so please bear with me if this comes across as a big unfocused

I have read through a lot of post here and other forums, and I found things similar to this (I found a post about random fortune cookie quotes), but those were all a bit more focused on the coding in itself, which is not really accessible to me (i have only very basic programming knowledge, and I am not sure if I have time to learn the basics fully). I am trying to catch up on everything myself, but thought that asking my be helpful. So I just wanted to ask for opinions on the following things:

3) Is there are generally very well regarded resource for such tutorials? I have started reading the "Beginning with Raspberry Thread" here, but just in case I thought it might be good to ask.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been hard for everyone. Why not give yourself a break and create this unique Raspberry Pi Zero project. This motivational quote bot will display a new quote every hour. It sits on my desk and gets me through the day.

You will also need an installation of Raspberry Pi OS on your micro SD card. If you are unsure of how to do this, please read the post How to Install an OS on the Raspberry Pi.

Start by pushing your Raspberry Pi Zero into the provided case. Note: Please make sure your SD card is removed before trying to fit the Raspberry Pi into this case. Failure to do this will damage the card

If you have already have a Raspberry Pi Zero and you don’t have header pins, you will need to solder these pins to your board. Otherwise, the Waveshare e-Paper screen should fit right on top of your Raspberry Pi. Getting the screen into place inside the case can be a little tricky.Do not force the screen on the Pi as you will bend the pins

Place the cover on top of the case and push firmly into place. After this, carefully insert the micro SD card back into the Raspberry Pi. The final assembly should look like below:

Power up the Raspberry Pi. You will now need to clone my Pi-Motivator repository. This repository includes the necessary Waveshare libraries, fonts and a file named quotes.json which is used to store the quotes:

Open motivator.py in the editor of your choice. I will be using vim for this tutorial. Start by importing json, random and textwrap. You will be using these imports to load in the quotes.json file, picking a random quote and wrapping the text to make sure that it fits on the screen,

Now that you have a way to get your quote, you need to print it to the screen. Initialize the module and print a white box which covers the entire screen. This will clear the frame:

And that’s it for creating this unique Raspberry Pi Zero project! As always, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them below. Additionally, if you run into any issues please let me know

Introducing Inkyshot: an inspirational e-ink display delivering a daily shot of encouragement through a quote or personalized message for you or your loved ones. Based on a Raspberry Pi Zero and e-ink display, Inkyshot is a perfect weekend project whether you’re completely new to IoT or an experienced developer.

Not having ever built hack projects myself, discovering and experiencing the ability to remotely deploy containers represented a whole new way for me to connect in personal relationships, which fuels the inspiration behind Inkyshot.

My sister and I share an extremely close relationship, despite living in different countries since I left home for college. Throughout the years, we’ve sent each other countless care packages, along with handwritten letters intimating the endless chats hanging out in each other’s rooms at home.

When I first saw the e-ink displays for Raspberry Pi Zero, I fell in love with it, and came up with the initial idea of this project: I wanted to send personal, encouraging messages to my sister that were more intimate than a text message, and faster than our handwritten letters. I mentioned the idea to our Hardware Hacker, Chris, who also wanted to build one for his partner living in another country. Together, we built Inkyshot: an e-ink message display that can pull an inspirational quote of the day, or send messages of your choosing.

It’s the perfect way for me to stay connected with my sister, and give her a shot of inspiration and encouragement wherever I am in the world, letting her know that I’m always thinking of her. You can also build a number of these and send them to anyone who needs some daily encouragement (scaling is easy with balena, and free for up to 10 devices)!

The links above are to vendors in the UK; if you’re in the US, Adafruit provides the InkypHAT and Raspberry Pi Zero WH, and here is a link to a Female Micro USB to DIP Adapter

The hardware set-up is pretty straightforward-- you will need a Raspberry Pi Zero WH (with WiFi and the pre-soldered header, unless you’d like to solder a header on yourself), on top of that, the InkypHAT e-ink display, and a Micro-USB power supply to power the Pi Zero. You’ll also need a solid SD card: I recommend the SanDisk ExtremePro, at least 8GB.

This can be set up in various ways depending on the case you’re using, but in either case you’ll have to solder wire from the Pi Zero onto the PCB of the adapter. Chris created a build video demonstrating and explaining how to assemble the case here.

And that’s it! Your Inkyshot will now display the Quote of the Day from the They Said So ® REST API, and you can now update your Inkyshot message through the balenaCloud dashboard!

Among the many things I could have built for my Hack Friday project, Inkyshot inspired me the most - it’s something that could make use of technology to create a positive impact on my relationship with my sister by keeping us connected.

Seeing it go from an idea to completion has been a magical feeling that I hope is shared by everyone who builds this project. It is my intention that Inkyshot will bring the same joy to you and your loved ones, wherever in the world they might be, and that it inspires closer connections in our most cherished relationships.

I decided to build a similar gift from scratch, using a Raspberry Pi and a custom-built wooden housing. In this post I"m going to cover both the software and hardware side of how I designed and built a custom book quote clock!

Raspberry Pi 3A+ (Due to supply chain issues this was literally the only model I could acquire in time for Christmas. I would have preferred a more powerful model but it gets the job done)

You could get by without the usb-c adapters, but I really wanted a flush-mounted USB-C port on the back of the case. More on that later. Depending on the size of the case you end up building, you may need a right-angle adapter for the micro-USB cable. There wasn"t enough space in mine above the Raspberry Pi to use a normal straight-end cable.

Thankfully, I was able to use Project Gutenberg as my content source. I downloaded a large plaintext subset of the library, containing about 60,000 books at a size of around 16 gigabytes. The gutenberg-dammit repository on GitHub was a huge help by providing plaintext copies of Project Gutenberg through 2016. Now, I needed to find the quotes I cared about. Let"s break down a particular time, say, 3:37. There are many ways to represent this time in the English language:

As I mentioned above, this is running on a Raspberry Pi 3A+ (this is the square Raspberry Pi). It"s powerful enough for running my simple web app, but it"s a bit underpowered for my liking. If I could have, I would have bought a higher end model but with supply chain shortages this was all I could get, and it still cost me $50 (about double what it should).

It"s almost 2022, and I refuse to make anything that doesn"t work with USB-C. I wanted the clock to have a detachable power cord, so I bought a few little cables and adapters so I could add a flush-mounted USB-C port to the back of the casing that powered the Raspberry Pi via its micro-USB port.

I always image my Raspberry Pi SD cards using Raspberry Pi Imager. This little open-source tool does an amazing job of simplifying the process of formatting and imaging a card to boot a Raspberry Pi from.

The touchscreen I ordered came with some drivers that needed to be installed in order to get the touch system to work. I also installed a number of other utilities. The unclutter package is used to hide the mouse after half a second, so it doesn"t show on the display. I took bits and pieces from this tutorial on pimylifeup.com, which is a great resource for various Raspberry Pi instructional articles. I didn"t follow that guide precisely, but there were some great ideas I did use.

When the Raspberry Pi boots, it automatically starts a node server to serve the NextJS app, and then launches Chromium in kiosk mode so that the web page is visible full screen automatically. The boot process is a little slow but that"s not really a big deal since I don"t expect it to be unplugged a lot. I"m using pm2 to launch the node server on boot. I"ve found this to be the most reliable way to automatically launch a node process and keep it alive indefinitely in case of crashes.

One of the problems I ran into right away is that the Raspberry Pi 3A+ doesn"t have enough memory to run the production build of the application, so I have to copy over the production build using scp. Something like this:

cd booktime && rm -rf .next && npm run build && rm -rf node_modules && cd - && scp -r booktime/ pi@192.168.4.122:times && cd booktime && npm i && cd -

I"ll break down this command quick, what it does is clean the build directory, run a production build, remove the node modules (so we don"t waste time and space copying them to the raspberry pi), copies over the build using scp, and then re-installs the local dependences so it"s all set to run another build next time.

The web server is also running on an open port on the Raspberry Pi, so a cool side effect is that I can visit the device"s local address in a web browser to see what the clock display looks like at any time.

Designing and building the housing out of wood was the task I was least confident about, and had the most room for error. I purchased some small pieces of poplar wood and got to work measuring and cutting the pieces to make the 3 individual components - the front frame, the sides, and the back cover.

Most of these pieces were cut at 45° angles save for the back panel. Everything was glued together using a strong waterproof wood glue and clamped tightly for about an hour before being sanded, starting with 120-grit sandpaper and moving all the way down to 220-grit for a smooth finish.

After the pieces dried for another hour or so, I cleaned them off and stained them with two different colors - a darker brown for the front and a red for the side and back.

I wanted a bit of a rustic look for these pieces, so to achieve that I simply put a little bit of wood glue on the surface of the wood, and once dry sanded it down so it was smooth but not fully removed, leading to the lighter patches you can see above.

To complete the main portion of the housing, I glued the front frame onto the side pieces, and after a bit of drying did another coat in the red stain across the entire thing, so that the front matches the reddish tint but still comes out much darker in color.

Now we need to finish up the back cover. This piece doesn"t go all the way to the bottom of the case, to allow for some airflow since the display and Raspberry Pi will generate a small amount of heat.

The last step for the case was to determine how to attach the back. I ended up going with two small screws so that I could remove the panel down the road if I needed access to the Raspberry Pi. This also meant I didn"t need to put the computer inside before finishing the case, which you"d have to do if you wanted to glue the back panel on. I definitely don"t recommend the gluing route, as there are various reasons you may need access to the internals for maintenance.

Even though the hardest part was over, I was still not looking forward to mounting the display inside the case - it needed to be perfectly square and there was no real way to line it up from the back. I ended up just holding it in place and repeatedly flipping it over to look at the front while it was powered on. Once it was aligned, I used some hot glue to tack it down around the corners, and then applied a generous layer of rubber cement and super glue to fasten it securely.

When attaching the back, the USB port was a little too large to fit with the Raspberry Pi in the case. I took a Dremel tool to the backside of the port and removed all the excess plastic so it was thin enough it fit inside without putting too much pressure on the cords.

Connecting an LCD display to your Raspberry Pi is sure to take any project up a notch. They’re great for displaying sensor readings, songs or internet radio stations, and stuff from the web like tweets and stock quotes. Whatever you choose to display, LCDs are a simple and inexpensive way to do it.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you two different ways to connect an LCD to the Raspberry Pi with the GPIO pins. The first way I’ll show you is in 8 bit mode, which uses 10 GPIO pins. Then I’ll show you how to connect it in 4 bit mode, and that uses only 6 pins. After we get the LCD hooked up I’ll show you how to program it with C, using Gordon Henderson’s WiringPi LCD library.

I’ll show you how to print text to the display, clear the screen, position the text, and control the cursor. You’ll also see how to scroll text, create custom characters, print data from a sensor, and print the date, time and IP address of your Pi.

There’s another way to connect your LCD that uses only two wires, called I2C. To see how to do that, check out our tutorial How to Set Up an I2C LCD on the Raspberry Pi.

Most people probably want to connect their LCD in 4 bit mode since it uses less wires. But in case you’re interested, I’ll show you how to connect it in 8 bit mode as well.

In 8 bit mode, each command or character is sent to the LCD as a single byte (8 bits) of data. The byte travels in parallel over 8 data wires, with each bit travelling through it’s own wire. 8 bit mode has twice the bandwidth as 4 bit mode, which in theory translates to higher data transfer speed. The main downside to 8 bit mode is that it uses up a lot of GPIO pins.

In 4 bit mode, each byte of data is sent to the LCD in two sets of 4 bits, one after the other, in what are known as the upper bits and lower bits. Although 8 bit mode transfers data about twice as fast as 4 bit mode, it takes a longer time for the LCD driver to process each byte than it takes to transmit the byte. So in reality, there isn’t really a noticeable difference in speed between 4 bit mode and 8 bit mode.

If you’ve never worked with C programs on the Raspberry Pi, you may want to read our article How to Write and Run a C Program on the Raspberry Pi first. It will explain how to write, compile, and run C programs.

WiringPi is a C module that makes it easy to program the LCD. If you already have WiringPi installed on your Pi, you can skip this section. If not, follow the steps below to install it:

WiringPi has it’s own pin numbering system that’s different from the Broadcom (BCM) and RPi physical (BOARD) pin numbering systems. All of the programs below use the WiringPi pin numbers.

To use different pins to connect the LCD, change the pin numbers defined in lines 5 to 14. You’ll need to convert the WiringPi pin numbers to the physical pin numbers of the Raspberry Pi. See here for a diagram you can use to convert between the different numbering systems.

To use the LCD in 4 bit mode, we need to set the bit mode number to 4 in the initialization function (line 20 below). The following code prints “Hello, world!” to the screen in 4 bit mode:

By default, text is printed to the screen at the top row, second column. To change the position, use lcdPosition(lcd, COLUMN, ROW). On a 16×2 LCD, the rows are numbered from 0 to 1, and the columns are numbered from 0 to 15.

The function lcdClear(lcd) clears the screen and sets the cursor position at the top row, first column. This program prints “This is how you” for two seconds, clears the screen, then prints “clear the screen” for another two seconds:

Each LCD character is a 5×8 array of pixels. You can create any pattern you want and display it on the LCD as a custom character. Up to 8 custom characters can be stored in the LCD memory at a time. This website has a nice visual way to generate the bit array used to define custom characters.

To print a single custom character, first define the character. For an example of this see lines 12 to 19 below. Then use the function lcdCharDef(lcd, 2, omega) to store the character in the LCD’s memory. The number 2 in this example is one of the 8 locations in the LCD’s character memory. The 8 locations are numbered 0-7. Then, print the character to the display with lcdPutchar(lcd, 2), where the number 2 is the character stored in memory location 2.

Here’s an example of using multiple custom characters that prints the Greek letters omega, pi, and mu, plus thermometer and water drop symbols for temperature and humidity:

As an example to show you how to display readings from a sensor, this program prints temperature and humidity readings to the LCD using a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. To see how to set up the DHT11 on the Raspberry Pi, see our article How to Set Up the DHT11 Humidity Sensor on the Raspberry Pi.

Hopefully this helped you get your LCD up and running on your Raspberry Pi. The programs above are just basic examples, so try combining them to create interesting effects and animations.

If you have any problems or questions about installing the LCD or programming it, just leave a comment below. And don’t forget to subscribe to get an email when we publish new articles. Talk to you next time!

This repository contains all the code for interfacing with a 16x2 character I2C liquid-crystal display (LCD). This accompanies my Youtube tutorial: Raspberry Pi - Mini LCD Display Tutorial.

During the installation, pay attention to any messages about python and python3 usage, as they inform which version you should use to interface with the LCD driver. For example:

It is possible to define in CG RAM memory up to 8 custom characters. These characters can be prompted on LCD the same way as any characters from the characters table. Codes for the custom characters are unique and as follows:

This demo uses ping and nc (netcat) to monitor the network status of hosts and services, respectively. Hosts and services can be modified by editing their respective dictionaries:

exchangerate-api.com / free.currencyconverterapi.com: There are a lot of currency apis but these ones offer free currency exchange info. Both are used, one as main, the other as backup. Requires an API key to use.

In order to use the script, you need to get API key tokens for both exchange rate services and the weather api. Once you"ve done that, edit the script to put your tokens in the USER VARIABLES section.

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Raspberry Pi Zero W is the Pi, but at a largely reduced size of only 65mm long by 30mm wide and at a very economical price. With the addition of wireless LAN and Bluetooth, the Raspberry Pi Zero W is ideal for making embedded Internet of Things (IoT) projects. The Pi Zero W has been designed to be as flexible and compact as possible with mini connectors and an unpopulated 40-pin GPIOread more...

That’s right, one of our favorite type of upgrades has reached the Raspberry Pi Zero board. Built-in WiFi is made possible with the BCM43143 WiFi chip addition. Sound familiarread more...