Tag Archives: LCD

Raspberry Pi & GPIO & LCD = awesome

Do you remember the LCD display? I’ve connected it successfully to an Arduino lately, so when I got my Raspberry Pi some days ago it was just a matter of time to try connecting the two:

Raspberry Pi with LCD

I followed the nice instructions by Adafruit, connected all the wires, ran the code, and everything worked great.

The code is written in Python, so that’s maybe the next language to learn for me ;)

The GPIO capabilities of the Raspberry Pi look very promising, so I might use them regularly in future projects, especially when a decent amount of storage or a network connection is required (both provided by the Raspberry Pi in a very convenient way).

Leaving the FEZ comfort zone – say hello to the breadboard

I’ve been very busy over the last weeks, but now I’ve taken some time to get deeper into the “core electronics part”, which simply means that I got a breadboard and some electronic components like resistors, transistors, LEDs and a lot of wires.

The first step was to get a normal LED on the breadboard blinking by connecting it directly to the Digital IO ports on the FEZ Panda board. Sounds easy but I did not want to break anything so after carefully reading some postings about the topic I connected die Digital IO port to a 220 Ohm resistor which was connected to the LED and then back to Ground. Using the OutputPort class on the given IO port the LED was blinking. That easy :)

As it was not as complicated as I thought it would be, I remembered the 2×24 LCD panel that I got from a friend. I wasn’t sure how it exactly works, but as I found out it has a HD44780 controller on-board that accepts 4-bit commands using additional wires for signals and power. And there is even a very useful C# class at the GHI Electronics website, nearly ready to use.

And guess what? After connecting the wires and including the pre-defined class I got the LCD working! Awesome!

I actually had to de-wire everything to put it back in the boxes for storage, but it’s not as hard as I thought to put everything together, so manybe I’ll use the LCD in some of the next projects.

And the next part of equipment is waiting: I just soldered the needed connectors to a 4×7 segment LED element, so stay tuned ;)

New piece of hardware: an LCD

Guess what I found at my desk when I came to the office today?

Saying thank you to my coworker Oliver for long-time renting me this 2×24 LCD with a HD44780 controller. I’m afraid that it’ll take some weeks to get it up and running, because currently I don’t have any breadboards, cables or things like that.