gpiozero lcd display factory

In this tutorial we"ll take you through how to connect a 16x2 LCD display up to your Raspberry Pi using GPIO pins. Being able to display a message on the LCD is not only very cool but can be pretty useful too, for example in this tutorial we"ll cover how to get your LCD display to display the IP address of your raspberry Pi.

For this exercise we are going to control the LCD display using 4-bit mode. Whilst is is possible to connect to it in other ways using I2C or the UART this is the most direct method. In order to control the display in this way will we need to use 6 pins on the GPIO port, 4 data pins and 2 control pins.

Register Select – This toggles the Lcd display between two modes, Command mode (high) and Data mode (low). Command mode gives a Instruction to the LCD. Example – “Clear the display” , “Move cursor to home” etc and Data tells the LCD to display characters.

In order for the LCD to work we will wire the circuit up in a fashion similar to the diagram above, but hold off connecting everything together for now! The list below tells you exactly what the pins on the LCD connect to:

Begin assembling the circuit by inserting the Adafruit cobbler into the breadboard. Remember to straddle the cobbler over the centre of the breadboard so that no two pin is in the same row. Next insert the LCD display into the breadboard. Connect the 5V and GND pins from the cobbler to the top of breadboard and also connect Pins 1, 2, 15 on the LCD and 16 to their respective power rails. Your circuit should look similar to the picture below:

Connect the GPIO ribbon cable from the cobbler to the Pi, if everything is working correctly the back light on the LCD should turn on like on the picture above. If it doesn"t work check everything is wired up correctly

Next wire up the potentiometer. The middle pin of the potentiometer is connected to Pin 3 on the LCD display and the other two pins are connected to ground and 5V (it doesn"t matter which way round). Check the potentiometer is working by twisting the nob until you see boxes appear in the first line of the display like in the picture below:

To get the Python code to run the LCD display we are going to "grab" it from adafruit using GitHub. Make sure your Rasp berry Pi is connected to internet and we"ll use the git command to clone the python code. Run the following commands in the terminal to download the files.

Now we can test the display is working and it is wired up correctly. One of the files we downloaded Adafruit_CharLCD.py contains python class for LCD display control. It also contains a small piece of code so when the program is run it will display a message on the LCD.

If you are using Version 2 of the Raspberry pi you will need to edit the program slightly since pin #21 has now been changed to pin #27. Open the file Adafruit_CharLCD.py with Python or use nano  Adafruit_CharLCD.py command to edit the program within the terminal. Go to line 57 of the code and replace:

Feel free to dive into the code of the program and change what"s displayed on the LCD. To do so open the program to edit like before and scroll to the last line of the code:

Simply change what is  typed in the brackets after lcd.message() to display the text you want.  The command is used to wrap the text onto a new line. A neater way of doing this is to change the last part of the program to look like the following:

This way when you run the program you will be prompted by "type your message here" to enter a message via your keyboard, which will then be displayed on the LCD. This was done by defining a new variable "message" that is equal to the command raw_input(), which allows the user to manually enter text. The part within the brackets of the raw_input() command is simply printed on the computer screen to prompt you what to write.

Getting the LCD display to display some text of your choosing is cool but not that useful. Running the program Adafruit_CharLCD_IPclock_example.py will display the date/time and the IP address of the Pi on the LCD. The program calls upon the methods from the previous program Adafruit_CharLCD.py. Feel free to open the program to look at the coding. To do so open the program in python or use the command sudo nano Adafruit_CharLCD_IPclock_example.pyin the terminal.

I needed a display for a new project that I am working on and saw that the 3.5 RPI Display Board was on sale and decided to pick one up. I"ve previously used mini OLED displays before, but they"re pretty limited by its size and the colors that it can display. This is a 480x320 resolution device that is designed to affix right onto the Raspberry Pi (RPi) GPIO pins. The installation is simple as you"d imagine:

For the project I had in mind, I do not need a fancy GUI nor the use of the touch controller. The display will be used to show console statistics and accessing the device using SSH.

I am using a vanilla Raspbian lite and no additional drivers were required to get this working. All we need to do is configure some boot scripts and introduce some new configuration files. It"s possible to do this manually, but thankfully LCD-Show automates the process for us.

It would have been nice if I could have mirrored the HDMI output and the LCD panel at the same time, but I could not figure out how to do this or if it was possible at all.

Secondly, it allows a remote user to connect to an existing SSH session. If I were to kick off a Tmux session on user log on, I am be able to connect to the same session from a remote computer. This means that I should connect to the session that is being shown on the physical display and interact with it as if I was seated in front of it.

The LCD is compatible with both the Raspberry PI Zero and its big brother variants so these same instructions can be applied to get them both running.

Searched and found that I need to set up environment variables e.g. GPIOZERO_PIN_FACTORY and also need to install gpiozero and pigpio and I pip installed them and tried to use code to set the pin factory as you could see in the commented code etc.

For a bit of background: I am a beginner learning python and am using gpiozero on python. I am trying to create a project just to continue learning how to use gpiozero where I am trying to connect things like a servo motor, LCD display, LDR, etc.

/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/output_devices.py PWMSoftwareFallback: To reduce servo jitter, use pigpio pin factory.See https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io/en/stab ... html#servo for more info

1. Is it even fully safe to change or can it cause problems with the Pi or other items, I would rather have problems with all my servos than my Pi and/or the basic things like buttons, leds, my LCD?

2. Can I still use gpiozero in python (as this is what I have been learning)... And if so are all the things the same (e.g. "From gpiozero import LED, Lightsensor", "led = LED(27)", "led.on", etc, etc)

3. *IF I can"t use pigpio like the default using things such as gpiozero as I have mentioned in question 2*... Is it something that I can set just for the servos. So I could have pigpio for use with my servo motors and then still use the default with my other things (like LEDs, buttons, LDR, LCD)

Thank you. I"m a bit confused as looking at that example on that link I have got gpiozero. If you look at my picture in a previous reply on this thread you can see I have the line:

Thank you. I"m a bit confused as looking at that example on that link I have got gpiozero. If you look at my picture in a previous reply on this thread you can see I have the line:

The line of code you quote here does pretty much what is says in English: it makes available the AngularServo Class, (and that Class only ) from the entire gpiozero library.

Illustrated in the gpiozero documentation already referenced, and described in detail in the Python3 documentation - https://docs.python.org/3/reference/sim ... tml#import

Thank you. I"m a bit confused as looking at that example on that link I have got gpiozero. If you look at my picture in a previous reply on this thread you can see I have the line:

The line of code you quote here does pretty much what is says in English: it makes available the AngularServo Class, (and that Class only ) from the entire gpiozero library.

Illustrated in the gpiozero documentation already referenced, and described in detail in the Python3 documentation - https://docs.python.org/3/reference/sim ... tml#import

Thank you. I"m a bit confused as looking at that example on that link I have got gpiozero. If you look at my picture in a previous reply on this thread you can see I have the line:

The line of code you quote here does pretty much what is says in English: it makes available the AngularServo Class, (and that Class only ) from the entire gpiozero library.

Illustrated in the gpiozero documentation already referenced, and described in detail in the Python3 documentation - https://docs.python.org/3/reference/sim ... tml#import

When we need to interface with sensors, motors, and displays we generally think about using an Arduino, however, there are a lot of advantages in using a Raspberry Pi instead. Today we will see how easy it is to interface devices using the Raspberry Pi GPIO.

The 3A has a full-sized HDMI port, an audio output, the CSI camera connector, and a DSI display interface. It only has one USB2 port and does not have an Ethernet RJ45 connector.

The General Purpose Input/Output bus permits your Raspberry Pi to communicate with sensors, displays and a wide variety of peripherals.  And, of course, it’s the subject of today’s article and video!

We will be using the gpiozero library for our experiments, and we’ll get our Python code directly from thegpiozero documentation “Basic Recipes” section.

TheLEDClass of thegpiozerolibrary is used, as well as theSleepClass from thetimelibrary.  We run the code in a While loop that always evaluates as TRUE so it keeps running.

The Raspberry Pi GPIO is a 40-pin connector that lets you connect your Pi to the outside world. Learn to use the GPIO and the gpiozero library to control some simple I/O devices.

For a bit of background: I am a beginner learning python and am using gpiozero on python. I am trying to create a project just to continue learning how to use gpiozero where I am trying to connect things like a servo motor, LCD display, LDR, etc.

1. Is it even fully safe to change or can it cause problems with the Pi or other items, I would rather have problems with all my servos than my Pi and/or the basic things like buttons, leds, my LCD?

2. Can I still use gpiozero in python (as this is what I have been learning)... And if so are all the things the same (e.g. "From gpiozero import LED, Lightsensor", "led = LED(27)", "led.on", etc, etc)

3. *IF I can"t use pigpio like the default using things such as gpiozero as I have mentioned in question 2*... Is it something that I can set just for the servos. So I could have pigpio for use with my servo motors and then still use the default with my other things (like LEDs, buttons, LDR, LCD)

Once connected the easiest way to get your servo moving is to use the Gpiozero library in a Python script. It is installed by default in the latest Raspbian image.

The first script makes use of the Gpiozero defaults. It assumes the servo uses a signal frame width of 20ms. The pulse width for the minimum and maximum rotation is assumed to be 1ms and 2ms. This information should be available in the servo specification and I would avoid sellers that don’t provide this data.

I found that with the default settings my servo only moved +45/-45 degrees. I changed the pulse width parameters in order to get a full 90 degrees of rotation in either direction . The script below demonstrates this :from gpiozero import Servo

Note:In order to control the contrast you can adjust the voltage presented to Pin 3. This must be between 0 and 5V. We used a resistor between pin 3 of LCD to GND of PI.

In the above tutorial we saw how to display the custom message on 16 X 2 LCD using raspberry pi and python.Now we shall move on how to display the current weather info on LCD:First we will need to download the python weather api.Download thepywapilibrary using the following command on your pi.wget https://launchpad.net/python-weather-api/trunk/0.3.8/+download/pywapi-0.3.8.tar.gz

Connect your device to the serial-to-USB adapter. You should see the initial boot output in Termite. If your screen is empty type status in the bottom command bar and hit enter. If you get a return message from your device similar to the one displayed under purple status you"re all set.

Device will restart and connect to your network. It will display your devices newly assigned IP. Direct your web browser to that IP address to access the Web UI for further configuration and control.