One of my personal quests is to learn a bit about software development. This project started as a personal quest to start with something I enjoy, which is Amateur Radio and Micro Compute platforms as well as hardware integration… I posted this below on the PiRLP Yahoo Group I am a member of…….
I know this is not earth shattering information or some crazy cool project, but I have been playing around with trying to add an LCD to my PiRLP node. Why? Well, I thought it might be fun to have an appliance feel to this node in some fashion.
Thanks to VE7LTD (Dave) and K9DC (Dave) for the kick start into what is possible to at least get status information for something to start with and do something easy to produce a result. Thanks guys!
Next steps are for me is to develop a menu driven system to use push button controls for some features that actually do something or let you chose what to display on your LCD etc. So many ways for this to go and make into a neat little appliance. I am not so much of a developer by any means, but this is a way for me learn and hopefully produce something others may be interested in and use. Check out the attached pictures.
Using a generic hd77480 compatible LCD display for this project. I re-assigned GPIO pins not in use for the node IRLP board on a Raspberry Pi 2. The library I am using for the LCD is the Adafruit library they have available for all different LCDs. Super easy to work with.
I would really like to use the I2C based LCD Shield but was not having any luck getting it to work with the IRLP board on the PI. Even though it appears that there should be no conflicts given the IRLP board does not utilize SDA and SDC, I am missing something as the I2C LCD seems to utilize more than just SDA, SCL, +5v, and GND. Not sure if this is because the Adafruit I2C LCD board has the 4 button capability or what. More for me to learn and any guidance appreciated.
Anyway, wanted to share… Happy to post my code and modified library files for this portion if anyone is interested. Added the python code into the rc.local file for auto startup after the IRLP scripts kick off. There will be much more to do, but this was an easy win for something to start with.
73,
Ed
K3HTK
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