OLED Stats display to Raspberry Pi OS BullsEye

I have tested this method successfully with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, Raspberry Pi 2B+, Raspberry Pi 3B and Raspberry Pi 4B.

This guide is based on The DIY Life's great guide for a Pi 4 Desktop Case, I simply simplified this part of the guide for future reference.

Resources

• A Raspberry Pi
• An SD Card
• A Raspberry Pi Power Supply
• A I2C 128x64 OLED Display
• 4 Female to Female Jumper cables

Connect the display

I assume that you are familiar with the Raspberry Pi, have set it up with the latest OS and have access to it.

• Make sure the Pi is off and disconnected to avoid shorting any connections.
• Plug the jumpers to the Display's GPIO pins
• Plug the other ends of the jumpers into the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins

Once you've double (or triple) checked your connections, power up the Pi.

Update the Pi and install the CircuitPython Library

In this first part we will upgrade the Pi to get all the latest updates and install setuptools. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get full-upgrade sudo reboot sudo apt-get install python3-pip sudo pip3 install --upgrade setuptools

Make sure you are in the root directory cd ~

Install adafruit-python-shell sudo pip3 install --upgrade adafruit-python-shell

Next, we download and install raspi-blinka

Make sure you have git installed to do this. You can check the that git is installed by running git -v. If a command not found error pops up, simply run sudo apt-get install git to install git.

git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts.git cd Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts sudo python3 raspi-blinka.py

Enable I2C from raspi-config

To enable I2C communication:

• run sudo raspi-config
• select Interfacing Options > I2C
• select Yes on first prompt to enable I2C module
• select Yes when prompted to automatically load the I2C kernel module
• select Finish
• select Yes to reboot

Check that your display is connected and recognised

We need to check that the display is properly connected and recognised by running sudo i2cdetect -y 1

You should then see a table showing the I2C address of your display (typically 3c ). If you have multiple I2C connections, multiple addresses will be displayed.

Download and setup the stats display script

Install the required libraries: sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-ssd1306 sudo apt-get install python3-pil

Download the script from mklements (a copy of the script is also available in this repo): git clone https://github.com/mklements/OLED_Stats.git

We only need the stats.py file, we're going to copy it to our home folder and ignore the rest.

cp OLED_Stats/stats.py . cp OLED_Stats/PixelOperator.ttf . sudo rm -r OLED_Stats/

You can then test the script by running python3 stats.py

Configuration for start on boot

We use cron to start the script on boot. To do this:

• run sudo crontab -e (if it is your first time running it, you will have to select an editor first - I recommend nano for beginners). I recommend you use sudo here to avoid user access right issues when booting up the Pi. Although from a security standpoint it is not a good practice, also make sure that you auto-login (sudo raspi-config) when booting up the Pi.
• add the following line @reboot cd /home/<username> && python3 stats.py &, making sure you replace your username and have the & at the end of the line. If you've changed the filename, make sure it is correct here as well. It should look something like this: @reboot cd /home/pi && python3 stats.py &
• run sudo reboot to test if it works

Future improvements

• add instructions for scrolling
• examples for displaying images
• examples for displaying other metrics (shell scripts)