PiDisplay

Setup and use the 1.3" OLED Display HAT for Raspberry Pi by Waveshare

The 1.3" OLED Display HAT for Raspberry Pi is a display the same size of a Raspberry Pi Zero. The information provided by the manufacturer Waveshare Electronics is somewhat awkward, so I decided to document my journey here, along with the Python script I adopted to control the display.

Hardware

The display attaches to a Pi via the GPIO. It is a 128x64 1.3" blue OLED display with a 5-way joystick on one side, and 3 buttons on the other:

• Driver: SH1106
• Interface: 4-wire SPI, 3-wire SPI, I2C
• Operating voltage: 3.3V

The display has some jumpers at the back to be soldered to enable/disable the interfaces it uses. It is a no-brainer to use the default 4-wire SPI which require no soldering at all.

Setup

I decided to use Python to control my display. There are other options from the manufacturer but I haven't explore them.

Note: The following steps are deduced from the documents provided by the manufacturer. I performed them in the exact order listed below, but I'm not sure if that is absolutely necessary...

Prepare raspbian

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install python-dev

Install RPi.GPIO

• Download RPi.GPIO from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/RPi.GPIO to somewhere.
• Extract the content (tar xvfz RPi.GPIO-x.y.z.tar.gz)
• cd RPi.GPIO-x.y.z
• sudo python setup.py install

Install spidev

• Download spidev from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spidev to somewhere.
• Extract the content (tar xvfz spidev-x.y.tar.gz)
• sudo apt-get install python-smbus
• sudo apt-get install python-serial
• cd spidev-x.y
• sudo python setup.py install

Install Python Imaging

• sudo apt-get install python-imaging

Enable the SPI interface

• sudo raspi-config
• Go to '5 Interfacing Options'
• Go to 'P4 SPI'
• Choose 'Yes'

Enable the I2C interface

Not sure if this is necessary, but well what the hack...

• sudo raspi-config
• Go to '5 Interfacing Options'
• Go to 'P5 I2C'
• Choose 'Yes'

Install the luma.oled driver

Well I'm not too sure about what is the point to install python-pip then remove it......

• sudo apt-get install python-pip libfreetype6-dev libjpeg-dev
• sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip
• sudo apt-get purge python-pip
• sudo -H pip install --upgrade luma.oled

Install ifstat for displaying network statistic

• sudo apt-get install ifstat

Test

That's it, the display is ready to use.

Sample python app

• Download the sample apps from https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/File:1.3inch-OLED-HAT-Code.7z to somewhere.
• Extract the content somehow, I'm too lazy to find out how to handle 7z on Linux... 😝
• cd to the subfolder containing the Python samples.
• sudo python demo.py

Next step

The Python code in this repo (monitor.py) display system information of the Pi:

1. Button 1 - Display information relating to the main purpose of the Pi: Disk space and WiFi.
2. Button 2 - Display IP Address, CPU Idle %, Memory usage and System temperature.
3. Button 3 - Display the system shutdown dialog, use the Joystick to select options, press Button 3 to confirm your choice.

• The screen will turn off after idling for around 20 seconds.

CPU usage

The original version was adopted directly from demo.py provided by the manufacturer, which is no good for 'production' use. Because your Pi will be too busy looking for button inputs instead of doing anything else useful.

The latest version utilize GPIO input detection instead of busy wait, which is much more reasonable CPU-wise.

Enable the display at startup

• sudo vi /etc/rc.local
  • Add the following line at the end of the file, assuming monitor.py is in /home/pi/:
  • sudo python /home/pi/monitor.py &
  • IMPORTANT Don't forget the & character at the end!