Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I2C LCD

I am done with buying cheap LCDs and trying to make them work. Last week I found an I2C LCD on ebay (named something like YwRobot LCM1602 IIC Arduino compatible) and I figured since it only needs a couple of wires to be used, I can give it a try. And it worked great!

Well not quite from the start, since I thought it needs 3.3V but after I switched it to 5V, it worked like a breeze. The library I used is LiquidCrystal_I2C (I found it here) - it is not compatible with Arduino 1.0 but I still have 0022 installed so no problem. Apparently, there is another library named fmalpartida/new-liquidcrystal that works with 1.0 but I haven't tried it yet - it looks like I would need to remove the library that comes with Arduino 1.0 and replace it with this one, I may try it someday.

Connecting to the Arduino is very easy:

  • GND to GND
  • VCC to +5V
  • SDA to analog pin 4
  • SCL to analog pin 5

    The next step is to use this LCD with my Raspberry Pi but if I understand this correctly, the LCD working at 5V and the Pi I2C pins working at 3.3V I need to be careful, I think I will wait until this board is back in stock at Adafruit.
  • Saturday, October 13, 2012

    Raspberry PI WebIDE

    Adafruit is awesome!

    This is my first post about my Raspberry Pi - so what's up with the subtitle? Well, we all know it already. Really, if you ever ordered something from Adafruit or if you asked for help or if you followed the tutorials or the newer Learn section... you know I'm right. And when the Raspberry Pi was born, Adafruit was one of the first sites with tutorials and help and even a new distro that made life a lot easier for beginners in Linux like me. And if all this was not enough to convince you, here is one more: the Adafruit Raspberry Pi WebIDE. I don't know when they find the time to do all this but I am so grateful they do.

    I delayed installing the WebIDE for a few days, thinking that being a Linux newbie I will mess it up for sure. But when I followed the Installation and Getting started steps in the Adafruit learning system, all was so very easy.

    When I first got my Pi, I was able to do some simple stuff like make an LED blink (Raspberry Pi Spy site helped me a lot - Thank you!) but now with all the cool libraries the WebIDE comes with I can finally start to really learn Python and hopefully make some cool projects! Thanks, Adafruit!

    Talking about learning Python, Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw looks to be an awesome book.

    And a final note and big thanks to Getting Started With Raspberry Pi blog: the info here helped me setup a VNC server and this made it accessible using raspberrypi.local:5901 instead of using the IP.