raspberry pi lcd screen projects free sample

Rather than plug your Raspberry Pi into a TV, or connect via SSH (or remote desktop connections via VNC or RDP), you might have opted to purchase a Raspberry Pi touchscreen display.

Straightforward to set up, the touchscreen display has so many possibilities. But if you"ve left yours gathering dust in a drawer, there"s no way you"re going to experience the full benefits of such a useful piece of kit.

The alternative is to get it out of the drawer, hook your touchscreen display to your Raspberry Pi, and reformat the microSD card. It"s time to work on a new project -- one of these ideas should pique your interest.

Let"s start with perhaps the most obvious option. The official Raspberry Pi touchscreen display is seven inches diagonal, making it an ideal size for a photo frame. For the best results, you"ll need a wireless connection (Ethernet cables look unsightly on a mantelpiece) as well as a Raspberry Pi-compatible battery pack.

Several options are available to create a Raspberry Pi photo frame, mostly using Python code. You might opt to script your own, pulling images from a pre-populated directory. Alternatively, take a look at our guide to making your own photo frame with beautiful images and inspiring quotes. It pulls content from two Reddit channels -- images from /r/EarthPorn and quotes from /r/ShowerThoughts -- and mixes them together.

Rather than wait for the 24th century, why not bring the slick user interface found in Star Trek: The Next Generation to your Raspberry Pi today? While you won"t be able to drive a dilithium crystal powered warp drive with it, you can certainly control your smart home.

In the example above, Belkin WeMo switches and a Nest thermostat are manipulated via the Raspberry Pi, touchscreen display, and the InControlHA system with Wemo and Nest plugins. ST:TNG magic comes from an implementation of the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System (LCARS) seen in 1980s/1990s Star Trek. Coder Toby Kurien has developed an LCARS user interface for the Pi that has uses beyond home automation.

Building a carputer has long been the holy grail of technology DIYers, and the Raspberry Pi makes it far more achievable than ever before. But for the carputer to really take shape, it needs a display -- and what better than a touchscreen interface?

Setting up a Raspberry Pi carputer also requires a user interface, suitable power supply, as well as working connections to any additional hardware you employ. (This might include a mobile dongle and GPS for satnav, for instance.)

Now here is a unique use for the Pi and its touchscreen display. A compact, bench-based tool for controlling hardware on your bench (or kitchen or desk), this is a build with several purposes. It"s designed to help you get your home automation projects off the ground, but also includes support for a webcam to help you record your progress.

The idea here is simple. With just a Raspberry Pi, a webcam, and a touchscreen display -- plus a thermal printer -- you can build a versatile photo booth!

Various projects of this kind have sprung up. While the versions displayed above uses a thermal printer outputting a low-res image, you might prefer to employ a standard color photo printer. The wait will be longer, but the results better!

Projects along these lines can also benefit from better use of the touchscreen. Perhaps you could improve on this, and introduce some interesting photo effects that can be tweaked via the touchscreen prior to printing?

How about a smart mirror for your Raspberry Pi touchscreen display project? This is basically a mirror that not only shows your reflection, but also useful information. For instance, latest news and weather updates.

Naturally, a larger display would deliver the best results, but if you"re looking to get started with a smart mirror project, or develop your own from scratch, a Raspberry Pi combined with a touchscreen display is an excellent place to start.

Many existing projects are underway, and we took the time to compile six of them into a single list for your perusal. Use this as inspiration, a starting point, or just use someone else"s code to build your own information-serving smart mirror.

Want to pump some banging "toons" out of your Raspberry Pi? We"ve looked at some internet radio projects in the past, but adding in a touchscreen display changes things considerably. For a start, it"s a lot easier to find the station you want to listen to!

This example uses a much smaller Adafruit touchscreen display for the Raspberry Pi. You can get suitable results from any compatible touchscreen, however.

Alternatively, you might prefer the option to integrate your Raspberry Pi with your home audio setup. The build outlined below uses RuneAudio, a Bluetooth speaker, and your preferred audio HAT or shield.

Requiring the ProtoCentral HealthyPi HAT (a HAT is an expansion board for the Raspberry Pi) and the Windows-only Atmel software, this project results in a portable device to measure yours (or a patient"s) health.

With probes and electrodes attached, you"ll be able to observe and record thanks to visualization software on the Pi. Whether this is a system that can be adopted by the medical profession remains to be seen. We suspect it could turn out to be very useful in developing nations, or in the heart of infectious outbreaks.

We were impressed by this project over at Hackster.io, but note that there are many alternatives. Often these rely on compact LCD displays rather than the touchscreen solution.

Many home automation systems have been developed for, or ported to, the Raspberry Pi -- enough for their own list. Not all of these feature a touchscreen display, however.

One that does is the Makezine project below, that hooks up a Raspberry Pi running OpenHAB, an open source home automation system that can interface with hundreds of smart home products. Our own guide shows how you can use it to control some smart lighting. OpenHAB comes with several user interfaces. However, if they"re not your cup of tea, an LCARS UI theme is available.

Another great build, and the one we"re finishing on, is a Raspberry Pi-powered tablet computer. The idea is simple: place the Pi, the touchscreen display, and a rechargeable battery pack into a suitable case (more than likely 3D printed). You might opt to change the operating system; Raspbian Jessie with PIXEL (nor the previous desktop) isn"t really suitable as a touch-friendly interface. Happily, there are versions of Android available for the Raspberry Pi.

This is one of those projects where the electronics and the UI are straightforward. It"s really the case that can pose problems, if you don"t own a 3D printer.

Raspberry pi is a powerful palm sized pocket computer based on the ARM cortex architecture. Because of its high operating speed, memory and wireless capabilities it is used by electronics engineers and makers for a variety of applications like Home Automation, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Computer vision etc.. The below list consist of a list of popular and useful Raspberry Pi projects using Raspberry pi 2, Raspberry pi 3 and Raspberry pi 4, ranging from basic projects for beginners to advanced industrial projects. All projects are explained with circuit diagram and a hardware working video. The python code for Raspberry pi is also provided for a complete do-it-yourself tutorial.

This article focus on what would be the best Raspberry Pi Projects for 2021. Raspberry Pi is one of the most reliable devices for every do-it-yourselfer. It is a low-cost, small-sized computer that enables you to create projects or even devices through computing.

Through this little device, you can now create your own security camera, game console, musical instrument, and many more. Newer models likeRaspberry Pi Model 4B- 2GB even allow you to create projects from scratch and then have them connected on your Wi-Fi. These tiny computers that look like a circuit board offer a lot of potentials and possibilities.

One of the most popular Raspberry Pi projects is the magic mirror. It is a cool addition to your house or office because it allows you to view your schedule, the weather, your to-do lists, and many more. The magic mirror even allows you to add and customize other widgets to the mirror’s reflection.

Another plus side to having a magic mirror is you can also upgrade it to a smart mirror and add voice control. But aside from the usual materials used in a magic mirror, you need to use theRaspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and add the Google AIY Voice Kit for this project.

Through solar-powered pi, your Raspberry Pi can run smoothly outdoors without any interruption. So if you mostly do your projects outside the house, then it would be best to start switching to a more economical power source.

Technically, you can power your Raspberry Pi using just a solar panel. However, we still recommend you to include a battery so that you would have a more consistent and uninterrupted power source.

If you are feeling nostalgic, then you can turn your Raspberry Pi into a retro-gaming console. Through this tiny computer, you can now emulate nearly every classic game from the 70s up to the 90s.

Since this project has been gaining a lot of traction, you no longer have to build everything from scratch. There is now a software called RetroPie that handles all your emulation needs. It is an easy-to-set-up software and it even has a user-friendly interface as well.

OctoPrint, which has been one of the most commonly known software for 3D printing, can be used in Raspberry Pi as well. This software allows you to collect data and even remotely monitor your 3D printer.

You might have noticed that there are camera modules compatible with different Raspberry Pi models. For example, theRaspberry Pi 8MP Camera Module only works well with the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, and 3 models.

Given that several people have already attempted to do this, there are now a handful of package or library prerequisites available online. You can just download it or modify it on your Raspberry Pi.

Another easy-to-set-up project for beginners is a Wi-Fi extender. It is a cheap and efficient way to expand the range of your Wi-Fi. So if you have a poor Wi-Fi connection in the garden or even your room, then you can use your Raspberry Pi to extend your Wi-Fi reception.

You can now create your own theremin through Raspberry Pi. As we all know, a theremin is an electronic musical instrument that can be controlled without any physical contact.

For this DIY project, you need a Raspberry Pi 4 model as well as an ultrasonic distance sensor to manipulate the notes. To make this project a lot easier to accomplish, you can use an already made code-based music creation and performance tool.

With the help of the Raspberry Pi, you can generate different notes and tones through your onboard audio jack. In addition, you also need a Raspberry Pi Cameraboard in order to make this instrument work.

This Raspberry Project from hackster.io can detect people and measure their skin temperature in a contactless manner. Apart from that, you can also measure the temperature and test multiple people at the same time.

Raspberry Pi Network Attached Storage or NAS is a great alternative for paid NAS services. By using your little Raspberry Pi 4 model, you can now create your own data storage server.

As with any other NAS, you can also share files from one always-on device to desktop or even handheld device. Through this server, you can store movies, videos, games, music, and pictures then just easily access them on your other devices.

Despite the fact that you can also achieve this project with your main PC, this Raspberry Pi NAS requires low power, allowing it to run 24/7 without interruption.

Rather than suddenly waking up with a jolt caused by your alarm, why not gently wake up with a soft light and ambient sound instead. Since physical sleeping cycle alarm clocks can be very costly, you can just create your own using a Raspberry Pi 4 model for a fraction of the usual cost.

Aside from your Raspberry Pi, you also need a speaker, temperature sensors, LEDs, a pushbutton interface, and so on. The guide can be found on instructables.com and the source code can be acquired on GitHub. Keep in mind that the guide is only meant to give you an idea about the project. You still have to improve it or even build your own model.

One of the most interesting Raspberry Pi projects this year is the Intercom Assistant. With the help of a Raspberry Pi, you can convert your old intercom into a wall-mounted Google voice assistant.

With the Raspberry Pi as your core, you can build your own touch screen display. Rather than spending several hundred bucks on touchscreen tablets, you can now create your own tablet for a fraction of the usual tablet or iPad cost.

As you can see, there is a lot of options to choose from when it comes your next Raspberry Pi projects. We hope that you found inspiration in this list.

LCD, DPI, SPI, HDMI, NTSC/PAL, TFT, OLED, ePaper, etc. this is part of the jargon you will need some appreciation of in order to be able to choose the right display for your project.The first part covered HDMI, DSI and Composite Video. This second part will focus on displays that utilise GPIO and USB as a mean to connect the screen to you Raspberry Pi. Hopefully as we look at the various options some of the jargon will be clearer. We will also venture into some additional considerations and alternative approaches to complete the “picture” (pun intended).

GPIO is the acronym for General Purpose Input Output and the main bonus that comes with it is that you can reconfigure each pin as either an Input and Output but also deem them to provide a different type of interface for the various types of displays and boards in general.

You can find displays that use DPI, SPI, I2C and even UART or an ad-hoc interface. Some Interfaces like DPI are particularly fast but will require lots of GPIO to interface with the screen, others like SPI and I2C need very few pins but won’t be as fast as DPI. Ultimately choosing between them will be down to your projects requirements. Let’s look at examples for each.

As a reference for the pins we can use the invaluable pinout.xyz website with alink to the DPI interface. As you can see the interface can use up to 28 pins and therefore should only if can allocate the GPIO pretty much just for the display. A lotmore informationcan be found at the Raspberry Pi website.

Pimoroni’s HyperPixelis a 4.0″ high speed display with a resolution of 800×480 and 18 bit per pixel. It also features aversion with the a capacitive touchand has a breakout port for the I2C interface. There is also aGithub repositorywhere you can find its drivers.

TheGert VGA 666 brainchild of Gert Van Looproducedby Pi Supplyand distributed by many is a very nice and cheap way of reusing an old VGA monitor. It doesn’t use all of the DPI pins because, as it says on the tin, it only use the 6 bits per colour mode or RGB666 and unlike the HyperPixel leave some pins free to be reused. As it becomes more and more rare to find VGA monitors in lofts I suppose this board will become eventually obsolete but it is still worth considering especially when working on legacy projects.

TheAdafruit DPI Kippahoffers in a similar way to the HyperPixel an 18 bit per pixel with 800×480 resolution but this time the screen is an LVDS display with choice between 5″ and 7″. This board also comes with or without the capacitive touch. Additional resources can be found ontheir Github repository. An earlier breakout board that Adafruit offered led to aninteresting detailed project documented on this blogworth having a look if you want to know more about venturing the DPI way.

SPI and I2C are amongst the favourite by vendors as they offer pretty much what’s needed for most use cases, utilise few pins and can be used by other hardware platforms quite easily. So no surprise to see the likes of Waveshare having quite a selection covering pretty much all the various interfaces.

WithSPIthe amount of pins required is much less, it only requires 4-5 pins and that’s why vendors are often adding additional hardware to their displays. SPI allows to control more than one device on its bus but it’s generally not used for more than one.

As for SPI evenI2Crequires few pins, in fact it only needs 2 which makes this interface very light in terms of GPIO usage. One additional advantage is that it’s very easy to use other peripherals in parallel to the same I2C bus making this option quite versatile.

A good bonus in getting an SPI or I2C display is that in general they come with additional hardware like buttons, LEDs and others due to the availability of many spare pins.

This is anSPI display I found on Conrad, it is a 4.57 cm (1.8″) TFT display and can provide 262, 000 colours with a resolution of 128×160 pixels. This is not a HAT and can easily be used for other platforms.

In the middle theRPi Display from Watterottavailable fromtheir own shopis a 2.8″ TFT with touchscreen with a resolution of 240×320, dimmable backlight, 3 buttons and full HAT compliance.

Thelast one is from Adafruitand similarly to the Watterott comes with additional buttons, 4 in this case. The TFT screen resolution is 320×240, features a resistive touchscreen and the backlight is dimmable via PWM.Adafruit offers a number of these screenssome with higher resolution and screen size.

The first from the left is a monochromaticAdafruit OLED0.96″ display with a resolution of 128×64. It comes with a breakout connector and can therefore be used with Arduino and other platforms. Even in this caseAdafruit has more to offerin terms of this type of screens with colour ones and bonnets designs (a type of pHAT essentially. That goes to show that in the absence of a standard chaos reigns, thanks God we now have theuHAT). This particular display can also be driven via SPI.

The middlesdisplay is from Pimoroni, it is also an OLED, it measures 1.12″, has a resolution of 128×128 and offers a breakout connector specifically designed to easily interface to a Raspberry Pi. As they also recommend there is anice libraryyou can use with your Pi.

Thelast one is again from Adafruitand it is one of my favourites. It shows how tiny and useful these OLED screen can be. The form factor is a SHIM which is a small pHAT.In Yorkshire accent” “Shove Hardware In’t Middle”— pimoroni (@pimoroni)February 20, 2019

As pHAT the SHIM is not a standard either and in fact it’s only used by Pimoroni but it’s a nice way to identify this size of PCBs and I vote for IEEE to adopt the term officially! The display is monochrome and has a resolution of 128×23 and it’s just a great addition to your headless Pi. Adafruit offer many good quality tutorials and there isone also for this display.

LCD displays like theHD44780 16×2are very common and widely used, they are cheap, well known and there are plenty of resources available. When all you need is just a bit of feedback and text is sufficient then these are the go-to technology also due to their low power requirements. There is a reallynice article from the RaspberryPi Spywhich shows how to use the I2C backpack that allows to indeed use the HD44780 via I2C thereby saving many pins and allow for a more modular approach for your project. The backpack also controls the dimmable backlight.

ePaper displays get featured here as the ones I found all use SPI. ePapers are truly nice when you are tight with power i.e. running off batteries and when you don’t need the picture refreshed often, you’ll still need to refresh it periodically but you will not risk getting ghosting effects due to always displaying the same image for days or months. You will in fact be able to display something then power-off your Raspberry Pi for a week and still keep the image on the display. It’s nothing new as the Amazon Kindle got us used to but it’s great to get this technology in our project. The screens come in very many different sizes to fit anybody’s need. A word of caution though, be careful with these screens as they are very, very delicate to the touch and brake easily.

Repaper, Pi Supply, Pimoroni, Waveshare, Adafruit are the biggest players getting a slice of the ePaper market. They all offer different screen sizes and features. This type of display offers such a variety that it would require a series of articles in itself. The ePaper screens are coming from one or two manufactures but each vendor tries to create a different product by leveraging on the features that the controller board offers as well as the software resources that come with it.

Waveshare has probably the largest selection of screens ranging from 1.54″ to 9.7″, monochromatic and colour, and resolutions between 200×200 to 1200×825, they even havea new generation of flexiblescreens. They all appear to use the sameSPI driver boardwhich can either be connected to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO or to other hardware platforms via a breakout connector. TheirWiki pagesoffer additional information and resources like demos and videos.

PaPiRus from Pi Supply was the first ePaper for the Raspberry Pi to get on the market after a very successfulkickstarter campaignwhich produced the HAT version of PaPiRus featuring 4 buttons, a breakout connector but most importantly an RTC circuit notoriously missing on the Raspberry Pi. ThePaPiRus HATsupports 1.44″, 1.9″, 2.0″, 2.6″ and 2.7″ ePaper screens whereas thePaPiRus Zerosupports 1.44″ and 2.0″. Pi Supply, now called Nebra Ltd, joined forces withRePapera couple of year ago and I’m sure we will soon see more from them in terms of offer. There is a buzzing community of people working onPaPiRus Github repositorywhich over the years added a lot of features to these boards.

A couple of years ago Pimoroni came out with their own ePaper boards. TheInky pHATfollowed by theInky wHATcalled this way as it exceeds the dimension of a HAT and lacks some of the features the HATs requires. (they have a tendency to coin new standards anyway :). The Inky pHAT is a 212×104 pixel e-paper display whereas the Inky wHAT has a resolution on 400×300. They are available in red/black/white, yellow/black/white or black/white for the pHAT only. More information on resources on theirGithub repository.

Adafruit has also got some ePaper displays. TheAdafruit SHARP Memory LCDdoesn’t seem to be supported for the Raspberry Pi nor I could find any resources that would indicate that but it is an interesting display for which at some point a library could be made available. It has an SPI interface, has a resolution of 168×144, it is ultra low power but most importantly has a fast-refresh rate comparable to an LCD. Although this is technically not an e-Ink display it is still worth considering for a specific set of use cases where it is important to be able to read the display in broad daylight and also refresh the images particularly fast.

Thelast display from Adafruitis in fact three SPI, Tri-Color (Red, Black, White) eInk / ePaper Displays with SRAM with screen sizes of 1.54″, 2.13″ and 2.7″ and resolutions of 152×152, 212×104 and 264×176. They come with a small SRAM chip in order to be able to store the buffer whilst a microcontroller fills it up essentially. This is particularly useful with small Arduino like boards. Once again there is no support for the Raspberry Pi but worth looking at if anything to see how much investment there is on the market for this type of technology.

This is somewhat a limited case and doesn’t really provide a “display” as you would expect it to be. I thought though that it would be worth covering this product as it will be useful under some use cases. UART allows for example for the display to be quite far from the Raspberry Pi distance wise and it is such a ubiquitous standard that it will find support in many if not all programming languages and it will certainly be something you can use on other hardware platforms too.

These aren’t displays in a traditional sense, you have to think of them as displays with their own graphics which you can sort of drive and customise to your needs via UART.NEXTION is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution combining a TFT touch display with an onboard processor and memory, developing by a free and downloadable NEXTION Editor software. Using the NEXTION Editor software, you can quickly develop the HMI GUI by drag-and-drop components (graphics, text, button, slider etc.) and ASCII text based instructions for coding how components interact at display side. With just 2 wires (RX, TX), NEXTION display quickly connects to MCU via 5V TTL Serial to provide event notifications that MCU can act on, and utilizes simple ASCII text based instructions so the MCU can easily provide progress and status updates back to your HMI user.

The TFT screens with integrated 4-wire resistive Touch Panel feature RGB 65K true to life colours, 4M flash memory and an on board micro-SD card for firmware upgrade. A lot more information can be found viatheir Wiki.

Thisarticle from Random Nerd Tutorialsexplains a bit more what to do and how using an Arduino but it shouldn’t be too far off using a Raspberry Pi instead.

In searching material for these articles I came across some exotic approaches and some other less uncommon ones like driving a HD44780 directly from the GPIO. There are several articles describing the connections and the programming here a small selection:

This way of using the HD44780 display won’t be as straight forward as using it with the I2C interface showed above and won’t use as few pins either but it is nevertheless an easy option to add a display in a headless configuration or in any case where graphics is not required and characters are possibly used to navigate through a menu and show some limited output for your program.

USB can offer good performances and similarly to what HDMI or Video Composite could offer a fairly long leash for the the screen to be located away from the Raspberry Pi. There aren’t many displays that offer support for the Raspberry Pi although there could be more to come.

Some of the technologies deal with how the display is connected to the Raspberry Pi, some are to do with how the images are actually displayed. In both cases you will have differences in performances and that will be one of the parameters to factor in your requirements i.e. Do you display static pictures or videos? Do you need colours? How many? Is power consumption an important factor?

After you’ve chosen the right display for your project you might also need a case for your Raspberry Pi, your display and whatever else you need for your idea to work in a nice enclosure.

There are several vendors which offer general purpose cases some of which I showed in the previous article. Of particular note isModMyPi which has a huge selection of casesmany of which designed by them.

Some displays don’t come with aFrame Bufferoption which allows your OS to output to the screen for example during boot time. Seeing what happens during boot or more generally be able to use the display as a standard output for you OS is very useful. Many projects will then integrate this functionality in their drivers and request the OS maintainers to natively include it for ease of installation.

SPI and I2C are interfaces on which vendors are rather productive and the choice here is much wider than with DPI. The answer I believe is that hopefully DSI but certainly already the HDMI interfaces render using the DPI less of a need and more of a luxury, SPI and I2C are enough when it comes to provide some feedback to the end user and in some cases even pretty good graphical contents.

AtThe Things Network in Amsterdam Pi Supply now Nebra Ltdhas officially presented a new Pocket Projector which comes either standalone or as HAT for the Raspberry Pi.

I guess pico projectors as maybe OLED, flexible and foldable, bigger ePaper displays, screen cast or mirroring are what we could see in the near future for the Raspberry Pi. Some of these are already there if using the right OS but whatever it’s going to be hopefully now you have a better understanding of how to choose the best display for your Raspberry Pi.

This is a new Pi Pico display from Waveshare with many more pixels. It is a 2inch LCD display module, designed for Raspberry Pi Pico, with an embedded ST7789VW driver, 65K RGB colours, 320x240 pixels and an SPI interface. A Pi Pico can be plugged into the rear of the screen for very easy connection without any soldering. It sports 4 simple button switches for user input. It is bright, colourful and easy to program. The makers supply an example program (see below), which includes the display driver, making it very easy to get started. The manufacturer"s wiki can be found at:

It won’t be an exaggeration to call Raspberry Pi a revolutionary gadget. When it was first launched in 2011-12, people couldn’t believe that a computer could be available for just $25