PiDisplay

Setup and use the Pi OLED HAT by Waveshare

The 1.3" OLED Display HAT for Raspberry Pi is a display the same size of a 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
• Display color: blue
• Resolution: 128 x 64
• Operating voltage: 3.3V

The display has some jumpers at the back to be soldered to enable/disable the interfaces it uses. I decided 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 didn't explore them.

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

I'm 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

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 are adopted by me from demo.py provided by the manufacturer.