Sunday, January 20, 2013

Raspberry Pi LCD Display

I have some ambition to use Raspberry Pi as a small network server. The biggest gain I see is its small form factor and the fact that it gets its power from USB. This makes it ideal to use as a small bootstrap device as well as a monitor server in the future. It can be plugged into any network device with an extra USB port and fit into any open space. I have had no problem installing all the packages I want (DHCP, TFTP, FTP, Scapy, etc).

To that end, I would like the Pi to have some way of displaying information to the outside world without the data tech needing to connect it to a monitor. Upon searching the web, Adafruit has a great post on how to drive a 16x2 LCD display with the GPIO pin on the Pi:

http://learn.adafruit.com/drive-a-16x2-lcd-directly-with-a-raspberry-pi/overview

Here are the components I bought besides the Pi itself:
1. 16x2 LCD Screen $9.95
2. Cobbler breakout cable (optional but highly recommended) $7.95
3. Enclosure (optional) $14.95

Then following the instruction from the Adafruit post, here is a picture of my Pi with the LCD display. Obviously the cobbler is great for doing other developments, such as driving a LED bulb, such as indicating a network fault when the Pi is doing monitoring.


LED Light:



I know they look raw, let me know what you think of the project. :)



1 comment: