raspberry pi turn off lcd display free sample

A common question we came across when building Screenly is how to manage the display’s power. When we first started out, we thought that this topic would be a trivial matter. It turned out to be anything but trivial.

Of course, different monitors behave very differently. What we discovered was that while most monitors would turn off just fine, many monitors ended up either not waking up at all or, alternatively, waking up in the wrong resolution.

This is why we still do not officially support turning monitors on or off with Screenly’s paid version. If you are running Screenly Open Source Edition (OSE) however, you are free to experiment with what works with your screen.

Let’s dive into how you can do power management on your display in Screenly OSE. The three tools that are relevant for this task are vcgencmd, tvservice and cec-client.

If you are lucky, your monitor will work well with vcgencmd. All this method does is toggle the power status of the HDMI port. This method will usually turn off the monitor, as most monitors will automatically go down in sleep mode if the HDMI signal is turned off.

However, beware that some monitors will switch to the another input when they wake up. Hence, if you have another active input, chances are the monitor will switch to that new input instead of turning off.

If your monitor turned off and on again with these commands, then congratulations. You can skip to “Automating the power management”. If not, carry on.

Another alternative is to use tvservice. Please note however that this tool often works for turning off the screen, but struggles with getting the monitor back into the right resolution.

Once you have figured out how to turn your monitor off and on, it is time to automate the process. The easiest way to do this is to use a cronjob to schedule this. (If you are not familiar with cronjobs, you can find a quick tutorial here. Use Cronjob wizard to generate a cronjob.)

For instance, if we want to turn off our monitor using vcgencmd at 8PM and turn it back on at 7AM on weekdays, we would create two cronjobs like this:

I am working on the raspberry pi3 wrote the following code under sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart 00 12 **** /usr/bin/vgencmd display_power 0 I know in terminal display_power 0 turns off the hdmi and the monitor then just needs to be turned off manually. Am I entering this code correctly so the display turns off at a certain time in this case it is set for noon. Any comments or suggestions is appreciated.

I am running Raspbian on my Raspberry 2B unit. It works perfectly but I want to figure out how I can change the screen timeout time. I want to monitor a screen for long periods of time and I can"t stop the screen from timing out and going blank. Where is this timeout period determined and set?

k7cwa wrote:I am running Raspbian on my Raspberry 2B unit. It works perfectly but I want to figure out how I can change the screen timeout time. I want to monitor a screen for long periods of time and I can"t stop the screen from timing out and going blank. Where is this timeout period determined and set?

If you ever go headless (now that’s a strange thing to say) then there is an older thread where we hit our head against a problem where these do not help viewtopic.php?p=1426207

I am running Raspbian on my Raspberry 2B unit. It works perfectly but I want to figure out how I can change the screen timeout time. I want to monitor a screen for long periods of time and I can"t stop the screen from timing out and going blank. Where is this timeout period determined and set?

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!

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.

It’s not only the devices that have experienced rapid development. The development boards used for them have started to become more and more commercial and accessible.

For this demo, we will use the ClimaCell Weather API as a weather data provider, as they have a large number of indicators, including air quality indicators, for us to use.

As soon as we have this API key, we can move to the hardware configuration and connect the LCD screen to our Raspberry Pi. You should turn the Raspberry Pi off while you make the wire connection.

This hardware connection will make the LCD screen be on full brightness and full contrast. The brightness level is not a problem, but contrast is because we won’t be able to see the characters on the screen.

At this point, we can turn on our Raspberry Pi and we should see the LCD screen alive. With the help of variable resistance we should be able to control the contrast.

As a programming language, we’ll use NodeJS to write the code. If you don’t already have NodeJS installed on your Raspberry then you can follow these simple instructions.

In a new folder, run the command npm init -y to set up a new npm package, followed by the command npm install lcd node-fetch to install these 2 necessary dependencies.lcd will be used to communicate with the LCD Screen

We said that we need an API key to communicate with the weather data provider. You place your secret API key directly in the main code, or you can create a config.json file in which you can place this key and any other code-related configuration you may have.

Writing on the screen is a piece of cake using the lcd module. This library acts as a layer of abstraction over how we communicate with the device. In this way we don’t need to micro-manage each command individually.

The keys cols and rows represent the number of columns and rows of our LCD display. 16x2 is the one I used in this example. If your LCD has just 8 columns and 1 row, then replace 16 and 2 with your values.

At this point, you can use this function and print something on your display. writeToLcd(0,0,"Hello World") should print the message Hello World on the first row starting from the first column.

ClimaCell provides a lot of weather data information, but also air quality and pollen, fire and other information. The data is vast, but keep in mind that your LCD screen only has 16 columns and 2 rows – that’s just 32 characters.

To find your city’s coordinates, you can use a free tool like latlong.net and then you can save them in config.json file along with your API key, or you can write them directly in the code.

The weather data is updated every 5 minutes. But because we have a limit of 100 API Calls / Hour imposed by ClimaCell, we can go even further and update the weather data each minute.

To print the time in the upper right corner, we must first calculate the starting column so that the text fits snugly. For this we can use the next formula total columns number minus text to display length

The LCD setting is asynchronous, so we must use the method lcd.on() provided by the related library, so we know when the LCD has been initialized and is ready to be used.

Another best practice in embedded systems is to close and free the resources that you use. That’s why we use the SIGNINT event to close the LCD screen when the program is stopped. Other events like this one include:SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 - to catch "kill pid” like nodemon restart

At this point you’re probably connected to your Raspberry Pi using SSH or directly with an HDMI cable and a monitor. No matter what, when you close your terminal the program will stop.

At the same time if you power off your device and after some time or immediately power it on again, the script will not start and you’ll have to do it manually.

From this point you can customize your new device however you want. If you find this weather data important for you (or any other data from ClimaCell, like air pollution, pollen, fire index or road risk), you can create a custom case to put the Raspberry Pi and the LCD display in it. Then after you added a battery you can place the device in your house.

Raspberry Pi is like a personal computer, so you can do much more on it than you would normally do on a microcontroller like Arduino. Because of this, it"s easy to combine it with other devices you have in your house.

and connect the other end of the USB cable to the USB port of the LCD; then supply power to Raspberry Pi; after that if the display and touch both are OK,

When you first set up a Raspberry Pi, it’s very scary for the screen to suddenly just go black. Don’t worry, there’s no need to be alarmed. This black screen can cause some necessary anxiety, especially during software updates and other long processes. Fortunately, there are several methods to prevent this, which I will share in this article.

Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a sleep mode, but it does utilize screen blanking which is very similar. To quickly disable screen blanking, use the raspi-config utility through the terminal and turn it off in the Display Options section.

If you need help getting started on Raspberry Pi, I have an entire course to guide you through your first steps. I’ll help you use the perfect hardware, plug everything in and install your first system. You’ll also do your first project with me, just to make sure you are ready for the next level. Get all the information on this page if you are interested.

Strictly speaking, the Raspberry Pi does not have a sleep mode as we would see on a desktop or laptop computer. The hardware is either on or off, but it does not go into a power save or sleep mode as you would see on a more complete system.

The feature is available on a fresh installation of Raspberry Pi OS, but it’s turned off by default. We call this a DPMS (Display Power Management System).

Hibernate is where we get into trouble because the Raspberry Pi doesn’t understand how to hibernate. Hibernation is transferring the contents of memory to disk and putting the computer into a very low-power state, which the Pi simply doesn’t support.

It can be difficult to recover from in certain circumstances because Pi doesn’t know how to deal with anything other than on or off. DPMS is best left off for our purposes. That’s why the Raspberry Pi Foundation enables screen blanking, but not the DPMS feature.

Screen blanking will take the image off your screen and replace it with a completely black screen, but the power is still supplied to the HDMI port. This is what you are encountering when you first set up a Raspberry Pi system, and it can be very annoying.

In recent versions of the operating system, raspi-config for the command line, and the Raspberry Pi Configuration utility used in the desktop environment have both added a switch to turn off the screen blanking.

Another way to control screen blanking is by using a good old-fashioned screen saver. When monitors had cathode ray tubes, these were essential to prevent damaging your screen from having the same image displayed all day.

The idea is that rather than having a screen display that doesn’t change, you introduce some motion or color-changing effects onto the screen when the user was not busy with the computer. This helped save CRT displays from “burn in” where the constantly displayed image became more or less permanent on display after hours.

Today, with LCD and LED monitors, screen savers aren’t really necessary, but they can be fun when your system is idle. There is an excellent screensaver available that works just fine on the Pi called xscreensaver. You can install it from the terminal with the command:

If you are not familiar with the installation of new applications on Raspberry Pi, you can click on that link to read my step-by-step tutorial on the topic.

However, if you select one that is listed in black, it will be installed and you’ll get a sample on the right. Down below, you can set how long you’d like the display to be idle before the screensaver appears, and also if you’d like the screen to lock with a password after a certain number of minutes.

One of the modes above is to choose a random screensaver, and if you choose that, the Cycle After setting will control how long each one is on the screen before it randomly chooses another one. It can be fun to see old favorites now and then, especially if you have been around long enough to have had one on a CRT display.

So, there you have several options for keeping the display alive while you’re working on things. It is usually one of the first things I do when setting up a new Raspberry Pi OS drive so that I don’t lose the display while doing updates or other installations.

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The STAY_ON_WHILE_PLUGGED_IN setting is set to BATTERY_PLUGGED_AC by default. You can programmatically change this value in your application code with the Settings API:

Obliterate the contents of flash. An example of a NO_FLASH binary (UF2 loaded directly into SRAM and runs in-place there). A useful utility to drag and drop onto your Pico if the need arises.

Runs the lwip-contrib/apps/ping test app under FreeRTOS in NO_SYS=0 (i.e. full FreeRTOS integration) mode. The test app uses the lwIP socket API in this case.

An LED blink with the pico_bootsel_via_double_reset library linked. This enters the USB bootloader when it detects the system being reset twice in quick succession, which is useful for boards with a reset button but no BOOTSEL button.

A copy of the TinyUSB device example with the same name, but with a CMakeLists.txt which demonstrates how to add a dependency on the TinyUSB device libraries with the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK

USB Dual Mode uses PIO as a USB host controller and the RP2040 USB device controller as a device controller. All the USB dual examples come directly from the TinyUSB dual examples directory here.

Under [Service], we specify some environment variables. We want to connect to our primary display (this assumes only one display is connected to our Pi), so we set DISPLAY to :0, and we tell our application where to find the necessary credentials to use the X windows system with XAUTHORITY. ExecStart is the command we want to run (starting our Python clock program, in this case).

Unfortunately with systemd, we cannot tell exactly when the X system will start, and we cannot necessarily guarantee that a user will be logged in (unless you have enabled auto-login with sudo raspi-config). To account for this, we will brute force our program to restart (with Restart) every 10 seconds (with RestartSec) if it fails or exits. KillMode tells systemd to kill off any processes associated with our program if the service fails (or exits), and TimeoutSec=infinity means that we don"t ever want to stop trying to execute our program.

For some services, like our clock.service example, you will need to stop the service before stopping the program. That"s because even if you stop the program (e.g. our Python GUI clock), the service will simply restart it 10 seconds later! To stop a service, enter the following command:

Note that stopping the service should send a stop command (SIGTERM--terminate signal) to your program. In most cases, this should stop the service and your program. If your program does not stop, see below on stopping your program.

ps -ax tells Linux to list out all the currently processes. We send that output to grep, which allows us to search for the keyword "python" (feel free to change it to the name of your program). Find the process ID (PID) number to the left of the listed process, and use the kill command to terminate that process:

A window will pop up with different tabs to adjust settings. What we are interested is the Interfaces tab. Click on the tab and select Enable for SPI. At this point, you can enable additional interfaces depending on your project needs. Click on the OK button to save.

We recommend restarting your Pi to ensure that the changes to take effect. Click on the Pi Start Menu > Preferences > Shutdown. Since we just need to restart, click on the Restart button.

These represent SPI devices on chip enable pins 0 and 1, respectively. These pins are hardwired within the Pi. Ordinarily, this means the interface supports at most two peripherals, but there are cases where multiple devices can be daisy-chained, sharing a single chip enable signal.

The Serial 7-Segment display is particularly useful for testing serial interfaces, because it can accept command from a UART, SPI, or I2C. Make sure to solder header pins on the 7-segment display before wiring.

Which generates an executable spitest. When we run ./spitest, it will exercise each of the segments of the display. It illuminates a segment in each digit for 5 seconds, before moving to the next segment. It takes about 40 seconds overall.

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:

7) Connect the HDMI interface of the LCD to the HDMI port of Raspberry Pi and then power on the Raspberry Pi, it can display normally after waiting for about a few seconds.

The screen is displayed vertically by default. For convenience, you can adjust the display orientation of the screen, see #Rotation(Working with Raspberry Pi).

After the display is rotated, the position of touch is incorrect because the touch doesn’t change with the display angle. So the touch also needs to be modified.

Note: If you increase the brightness, it may cause the insufficient power of the LCD by getting power through the USB interface. To solve this problem, you can input 5V/2A power through the Power interface on the back of the LCD.

Since the first-generation Raspberry Pi released, Waveshare has been working on designing, developing, and producing various fantastic touch LCDs for the Pi. Unfortunately, there are quite a few pirated/knock-off products in the market. They"re usually some poor copies of our early hardware revisions, and comes with none support service.

Please note that we"ve found some poor copies of this item in the market. They are usually made of inferior materials and shipped without any testing.

6) Power on the Raspberry Pi and wait for a few seconds until the LCD displays normally. And the touch function can also work after the system starts.

Note: If you use the 2021-10-30-raspios-bullseye-armhf image or the laster version, please add the line dtoverlay=rpi-backlight to the config.txt file and reboot.

The latest trend of digital signage involves distributing signs, announcements, and other information on digital screens instead of through billboards or printed information. These digital notices and advertisements are appearing all over – in streetcars, buses, shopping malls, universities, companies, city centers, and more.

If you would like to put together an info screen yourself, you will find that it"s relatively easy and inexpensive to do. Aside from a monitor in the size of your choice, you will only need a Raspberry Pi, a few cables, and some free software.

Screenly OSE is easy to install. On the Screenly homepage [1], you will find a compressed image available for downloading. All you have to do is install the image on an SD card with at least a 4GB capacity; connect a network cable, a power supply, and a screen to the Rasp Pi and you are ready to roll.

The second option is to install Raspbian yourself. This process will require that you switch the computer into graphical mode via sudo raspi-config. Then, as the pi user, you will need to enter the command from Listing 1, which will produce a somewhat lengthy output.

As part of the process, curl loads a script file from a server, and the result goes directly to the shell via a pipe transfer to execute the script immediately. If you want to know in advance what will occur afterward, you can leave out the | bash at the end of the line and take a look at the script content.

In this way, you will also be able to see why the installer needs Raspbian. Screenly has been programmed in Python, so, theoretically, it can also run on other Raspberry distributions like Pidora. Nonetheless, the setup contains Debian-specific commands for setting up necessary software packages. Manual retrofitting would be necessary if other distributions were used.

After turning on the screen and booting the mini-PC, the Rasp Pi will next display a brief announcement with information on the website that you will use to control the screen. You can enter this website address in a browser on a different computer that is connected to the network and then configure the contents you want to be displayed.

Screenly and Raspbian are constantly being worked on and developed. As a result, it"s a good idea to update both components to the current version. On its own, Screenly comes up displaying a short Update available message on the screen. You can update the software using the following command.

Figure 1: Besides providing certain status information, the main screen for Screenly offers the option of uploading media like pictures, videos, and texts.

A dialog opens that offers the opportunity to upload pictures and videos (Figure 2) or display the URL for web pages and graphics. This makes it possible to show pictures captured by a webcam on the information screen.

Midori is the browser being used for displaying websites. You should quickly check over the display because Flash does not function in Midori. Additionally, designers usually don"t check their sites on this browser, so the sites might not otherwise appear the same in Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

Pictures should be available in JPEG, PNG, or GIF format. For videos, OMXPlayer is a bit more particular. It requires video files in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. If necessary, you can adapt the material with the help of ffmpeg or vlc, but only if you use a high-performance computer for doing so.

In addition to specifying which elements go into the display, you can also determine when and how long the asset run, which means you can plan for the future. For example, in October, you can prepare Christmas greetings and New Year"s wishes that appear punctually over the holidays. The media are not activated when they are uploaded; this happens instead with a mouse click. You can determine the sequence of currently active assets with a simple drag and drop.

Screenly offers various possibilities for settings and system information. By clicking on Screenly OSE at the upper left, you get out of the corresponding dialog and go back to the administration of assets.

In the example, the firewall permits access only to the computer with the IP address 192.0.2.1. All others are blocked. 127.0.0.1/255.0.0.0 and $IP are IP addresses for the Raspberry Pi.

Still lacking is the automatic screen switch-off. This does not function via the web interface; however, it can be set up easily with the help of the tvservice utility. Using tvservice, you can set the resolution and turn off the output port via sudo tvservice -o, which causes the monitor or TV to enter sleep mode. With the option -p or -e, you can wake up the screen again. To obtain information on display modes, use the following command:

The CEA-HDMI modes are intended for TVs, and the DMT-HDMI modes are for monitors. For example, if you want to turn on the screen every day on Monday through Friday from 8AM to 6PM, you should use a cron job. Then, you will need to save the text from Listing 3 in the /etc/cron.d/signage file.

A compressed image for Raspberry Digital Signage is ready and available to be downloaded from SourceForge and installed on an SD card. You can find the IP address by going through the boot messages when rebooting the Raspberry Pi. You can get to the web interface via the web server on the Raspberry Pi.

The capabilities of the SourceForge software are limited. You will only have the option of presenting a web page or up to four images or videos. However, a paid version is available – the Raspberry Digital Signage donors" version – that has more functionality (Figure 3).

Moreover, the source code is not available, even though Raspberry Digital Signage exists as an installable image on SourceForge. The image file does contain the PHP code; however, it does not provide information about the license. The SF page also fails to provide the necessary information. Only the homepage [2] makes it clear that the code is subject to the GPLv2 license.

Going over the quality of everything, the case isn"t bad. It"s nothing fancy, but for what it is it"s built well and everything fit together nicely. I had no trouble putting it all together, and its design happens to make it more convenient for me. This will certainly not protect the pi from dust or really anything else; It"s really just there to support the screen. Speaking of which, the screen is also built quite nicely. It"s a fairly good screen but unlike my IPS monitors, the backlight tends to reduce quality significantly when not viewed straight-on. This was somewhat disappointing but not entirely surprising. It"s not exactly practical to view the screen from 178 degrees but one reason I was attracted to this was because I wanted to be able to place this on a table and have no discoloration when viewed from a reasonable angle. For the most part, it"s fine, just not quite as good as I was hoping. Worth noting, it comes with some heatsinks and a fan. I wanted to keep the ones I had before but because they were so high-profile, they would get in the way of the included fan. I didn"t exactly feel comfortable omitting the fan, so I installed everything using the kit. So far it has not been an issue.

Depending on what you want to do with this screen, setup can be really simple or painful. If you set it up per their recommendations, I"m sure it all works fairly well, provided you are expecting to use this on a Raspberry Pi with the desktop enabled. I tried it briefly and it works alright but, to be honest, I am not sure why I would want to use a Raspberry Pi, even a 4, for the desktop experience. It"s impressive for the price and the size, but your smart phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer will offer a far better experience than what this can offer. What I expected was that this little screen would basically be a tiny TV with a small resolution, but this isn"t exactly the case. The reason for this is that this screen is not 16:9, it"s 9:16. To clarify, this is just a little monitor with a HDMI input and a 3.5mm jack output, so I expected that with power supplied it would function just like any display would. My PC, however, did not recognize it at all, and the Pi is confused by it as well. You need to add in specific display settings into the Pi"s configuration file in order for it to work. Once it does, any apps designed for a landscape screen will not work well as this is in portrait. Surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi does not have a great workaround for this. If you intend to use Retropie, the drivers that allow the touch screen to allow touch, and to rotate, will not work. There are some workarounds for this and I suggest researching into how to set up Retropie as a vertical cabinet. Fortunately, the Retropie default interface works alright in portrait and games can be specifically rotated. Because the case"s design, you can also set it easily in portrait or landscape positions on its side. This was probably not the intent behind their design but it works nonetheless.

Last thing worth mentioning, you might wonder why you would want to use the 3.5mm jack on the screen instead of the one already available on the Pi4. I tried both and the one on the screen is significantly boosted. It does, however, seem to introduce a clicking sound into the audio sometimes. It"s noticeable and not really worth the added volume. I suspect this is a decent feature if you intend to plug this into something other than the Pi4 but otherwise it"s just another option for audio you can choose to use or not. With some work, it might be possible to eliminate the audio issue.

You will likely be using the command line a lot when working with Raspberry Pi’s. Below I provide a concise list of the essentials. If you are not already a bit familiar with the command line, I recommend the free ebook from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

apt is a package manager included with the Raspberry Pi OS that makes it very easy to install and manage new software packages on your Raspberry Pi. Note that a super user (see above) is needed to install or remove packages. To install a new package: sudo apt install

The resolution of the LCD display is 800 x 480, you can configure the resolution via software, and the maximum resolution it supports is 1920 x 1080. It is a USB capacitive touch screen and does not require a driver. It supports five touch control, besides that, the LCD screen comes with an OSD menu adjustment function. You can adjust the contrast, brightness, and switch button. There are 9 interfaces on the back of the screen, one earphone for audio output; two touches (USB connector), for power supply and touch output; one display, an HDMI interface, for connecting the motherboard and LCD display. One power, it can control the backlight to turn on and turn off to save power. One return, it’s only useful in the OSD menu. One right/down, backlight shortcut key. One left/up, backlight shortcut key. A menu, it’s useful in the OSD setting menu, open the OSD/ select key.

*When working with Raspberry Pi 4, for the system image of Raspberry Pi after 2021-10-30, for example on Bullseye, please modify "dtoverlay = vc4-kms-v3d" to "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-v3d" in the config file, otherwise it may fail to start. But on Buster, please comment out "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-V3D" by adding #.

Grove is a modular prototyping system consist of a base unit and various modules with standardized connector. The base unit is generally a microprocessor which allows for communicates, processes and controls the input or output from the Grove modules. Every single Grove module typically addresses a single function, range from a simple button to a more complex heart rate sensor. the standardised Grove connector allows user to assemble Grove units with building block approach, compared to the jumper or solder based system it is much easier to assemble or disassemble, which simplifies the learning system for experimenting, building and prototyping.

We also provide Grove to Pin Header Converter or Grove Base HAT available for variety developing platforms for those who wants to use grove sensor and actuator modules without Grove System Development Board.

Today, the grove series of sensors, actuators, and displays have grown into a large family. More and more grove modules will join the Grove ecosystem in the future. We see the Grove helps makers, engineers, teachers, students and even artists to build, to make, to create...We always feel it is our responsibility to make the Grove module compatible with more platforms. Now we bring you the Grove Base Hat for Raspberry Pi and Grove Base Hat for Raspberry Pi Zero, in another word, we bring the Raspberry Pi the Grove System.

The Grove Base Hat for Raspberry Pi provide Digital/Analog/I2C/PWM/UART port to meet all your needs. With the help of build-in MCU, a 12-bit 8 channel ADC is also available for Raspberry Pi.

PWM：The Grove PWM Port connect to GPIO/BCM pin12(PWM0) and GPIO/BCM pin13(PWM1), which is the hardware PWM pin of Raspberry Pi, in addition, you can use all the GPIO pin as the soft PWM pin.

All the silkscreen layer pin number besides the Grove port is the BCM pin number. The difference between BCM pins and the physical pins please refer to here

The GPIO/BCM pin18 is also marked as PWM0, actually the GPIO/BCM 12 and the GPIO/BCM 18 share the same PWM channel, so they can"t set to different rate.

UART: The Grove UART port connect to the GPIO14(UART0 TX) and GPIO15(UART0 RX). UART is commonly used on the Pi as a convenient way to control it over the GPIO, or access the kernel boot messages from the serial console (enabled by default).It can also be used as a way to interface an Arduino, bootloaded ATmega, ESP8266, etc with your Pi.

Digital：There are 6 digital Grove sockets in this board, normally the yellow wire(which connect to the top pin of the 4 pins Grove socket as) of Grove cable is the signal wire, so we name the digital Grove port D5/D16/D18/D22/D24/D26.

Analog：As we know, there is no ADC in the Raspberry Pi, so it can not work with analog sensor directly. Now with the help of the build-in MCU STM32, the Grove base hat can work as an external 12-bit ADC, which means you can use analog sensor with your Raspberry Pi. Even more pleasing is that not one but four analog Grove sockets are available. The analog sensor inputs the analog voltage into the 12-bit ADC. After the ADC convert the analog data to digital data, it input the digital data to the Raspberry Pi through the I2C interface.

I2C：There are three I2C port available in this board, they all connect to the I2C pin of the raspberry directly. You can consider this part as an I2C hub. Most of seeed"s new grove modules have I2C interface, you may find those three port is extremely useful.

SWD： We use SWD port to burn the firmware to this hat. In addition, you can see 3 GPIO pins in this section, i.e., pin 9/pin 10/pin 11. Those three pins do not used by any Grove port, you are free to use them without worrying about pin conflicts.

This module uses piezo buzzer as the main component, it can produce high pitch tone while it is connected to digital output and logic level set to High, otherwise it can produce various tones according to the frequencies generated from the Analog PWM output that connected to it. (note: the frequency range that normal human ear can distinguish is between 20 Hz and 20kHz.)

Grove - mini PIR motion sensorallows you to sense motion, usually human movement in its range. Simply connect it to Grove - Base shield and program it, when anyone moves in its detecting range, the sensor will output HIGH on its SIG pin.

Grove - Servo is DC motor with gearing and feedback system. It is used in driving mechanism of robots. The module is a bonus product for Grove lovers. We regulated the three-wire servo into a Grove standard connector. You can plug and play it as a typical Grove module now, without jumper wires clutter.

This Grove - Ultrasonic ranger is a non-contact distance measurement module which works at 40KHz. When we provide a pulse trigger signal with more than 10uS through singal pin, the Grove_Ultrasonic_Ranger will issue 8 cycles of 40kHz cycle level and detect the echo. The pulse width of the echo signal is proportional to the measured distance. Here is the formula: Distance = echo signal high time * Sound speed (340M/S)/2. Grove_Ultrasonic_Ranger"s trig and echo singal share 1 SIG pin.

This Grove – 162 LCD module is a 16 Characters 2 Lines LCD display, it uses I2C bus interface to communicate with the development board, thus these will reduce the pin header from 10 to 2 which is very convenient for the Grove system. This LCD display module also supports customise characters, you can create and display heart symbol or stick-man on this LCD module through a simple coding configuration.

The Wi-Fi name and password should be the same as your local Wi-Fi which your PC connected to(make sure your PC and Raspberry Pi are in the same LAN).

Open VNC Viewer and enter the IP address of Raspberry Pi. You can find the IP address by typing ++ifconfig++ command in the terminal of Raspberry Pi (or you can enter raspberrypi.local).

After all the basic set up of Raspberry Pi, we can now run the LED demo code. Note: You should complete the steps above first in order to continue the following.

When you single click the LED button, LED will change to "ON" mode, "OFF" if you long press it. If you double click the LED button, the LED will bink.

To start on the Grove tutorial, you are required the fundamental knowledge of Raspberry Pi and Python programming language. Please make sure you have completed the basic setup tutorial above successfully and finished the LED Blink demo and ensure it is fully working with your Raspberry Pi with the Grove Base Hat.

If everthing goes well, you will find that when you long press the LED button, the LED will go off and the buzzer will emit a long "Do" sound. However, when you single press it, the LED will light up and the buzzer will make a short "Do" sound.

Now, compare the result from lesson four and lesson five, are you able to list the advantages and disadvantages of Grove - mini PIR motion sensor and Grove Ultrasonic Ranger?

If everything goes well, you will be able to see the moisture level on the LCD screen. Buzzer is used to alert people once the moisture level reach "wet".