Pi Lite

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Revision as of 17:18, 22 December 2013 by Martin (Talk | contribs) (Access to the serial port)

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The Pi-Lite is an LED matrix display designed for scrolling text and graphics. It connects directly into the Raspberry Pi GPIO ports and requires no hardware hacking [1]

Starting Point

The following assumes you have a working RPi set-up with the default user, see Setup_NOOBS

Installation

The Pi-Lite developer provides the full documentation [2] and user guide [3]

The following assumes you are logging into your Raspberry Pi via ans SSH terminal Enable_SSH#Connect_via_SSH_on_a_Local_network

Access to the serial port

By default the Raspberry Pi’s serial port is configured to be used for console input/output. Whilst this is useful if you want to login using the serial port, it means you can't use the Serial Port in your programs. The Pi-Lite requires access to the Serial Port.

To enable the serial port for your own use you need to disable login on the port. There are two files that need to be edited '/etc/inittab' and '/boot/cmdline.txt'

Edit 'inittab' and comment out the line 'T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100' using the '#'. Its at the end of the file

sudo nano /etc/inittab

Edit 'cmdline.txt' and delete the highlighted section dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

Reboot your Pi.

sudo reboot

Minicom

sudo apt-get install minicom

Serial Port Access Group : DialOut

Add the pi user to the dialout group

sudo usermod -a -G dialout pi

GIT the code

Install the required tools

http://openmicros.org/index.php/articles/94-ciseco-product-documentation/raspberry-pi/303-pi-lite-setting-up-for-python-examples

sudo apt-get install git python-serial python-setuptools pip
sudo pip install arrow
sudo pip install xively-python

Clone the Pi-Lite GIT repository

cd ~ && git clone git://github.com/CisecoPlc/PiLite.git

Twitter Feed Installation

The Twitter module installation is a bit more involved

git clone git://github.com/bear/python-twitter.git
cd python-twitter
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

Example Python Programmes

List the examples with

ls ./
list of examples here 

Run any of the examples using the script name

python PiLiteWeather.py

or

./PiLiteWeather.py

Developing your own uses

The Pi-lite developers offer a user graphical interface for emulating the Pi-Lite, thisi is useful for development and experimentation.

http://openmicros.org/index.php/articles/94-ciseco-product-documentation/raspberry-pi/305-pi-lite-python-emulator

see 'Python_Examples/PiLiteEmulator.py'


References

  1. Pi-Lite - Lots of LEDs for the Raspberry Pi
  2. Pi-lite documentation
  3. Pi-Lite set-up user guide