After a challenging start with my Rpi (you can read it here) finally I can really start to play with it.

The first thing I did was to complete the HDMI Led screen setup. The screen touch was working the last time I left it but I wasn’t able to see anything. Maybe I didn’t connect the HDMI ports properly I’m not sure (there is a small HDMI plugin that connects the screen with the Rpi) So this time when I booted my RPi, there were few thins on the screen – but not readable! the pixels were slipped. The configuration I copied from the waveshare wiki was changed, cause I noticed that there was a missing row about the display resolution in the config.txt file. Maybe it was me mistakenly removing it as I was trying to change the resolution to a bigger version in VNC.
“hdmi_cvt 480 800 60 6 0 0 0”

Below are the pictures for before and after 🙂

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Cool, now my HDMI Led screen works. It’s a tick in the list and also having the capability for my future projects. Of course the first thing to do is to write “Hello World” 🤣

This week I received the sensors and the kit I have ordered form Amazon. So now I have a breadboard, some motors, leds, resistance (220 ohm, 10 ohm etc), cables, digital screens, GPIO extension for the RPI and my hygrometer sensors 🙂 I had to figure out how those things work. I remember building some circuits in the labs of the university around 2006 or 2007.

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The kit I bought has a tutorial and some projects that explains the circuit to be created and the ready codes (both in C and python, I prefer the later one) I started reading some basics, what is the GPIO extension, how it works and eases the circuit building with RPi, what the colorful strings mean on the resistance and how it helps with the calculation, how to provide power to breadboard for larger circuits as the power of RPi may not be enough at some point etc etc.. Refreshing the memory..

But of course I was impatient to try something with it.. The first projects were about turning on a led, enabling a button etc. Seeing the led blinking put a stupid smile on my face 😀 “Yes, it is working!”. I added the codes to my git hub repo – hoping that I’ll be writing my own codes soon..

The next one introduced a button into the circuit so that I can control the led. I’m still unclear about the resistance calculation – for now I just follow the instructions, at some point I’ll need to figure that out as well for my “future project” with my plants.

It was a fun exercise.. 🙂 I also had another version of this button and the led code: turning on and off the led like a switch.. Not to keep it on while the button is pressed like above.

There are so many projects in this kit. So I plan to do most of them to reinforce the circuits and a low level coding.. We’ll see how it goes…

alladola, 29th May 2020, Dublin