LCD connection to Arduino

Raspberry Pi Arduino I2C Interface

by Lewis Loflin

YouTube video Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Learning Linux

What follows is the code used in my YouTube video above and an explanation of its operation. This is a very basic demo that will be used as a basis for more complex programs.

The Arduino is connected to the above display circuit. Then the Raspberry Pi connects to Arduino by I2c.

The first program was written for the Raspberry Pi in python. Python is a high level, general purpose interpreted language. High level in the fact it's remote from the underlying hardware. Being an interpreted language means each line of code is read, interpreted, and implemented as it's running. Python is best used for numbers and strings.

It's for those reasons python is worthless for machine control. Yes it has some GPIO and an I2C interface, but those can be accessed only with additional libraries but the system is still slow being an interpreted language. While it can read some I2C or SPI sensors it would be far better to use a micro-controller such as Arduino to deal with hardware control, while the Raspberry Pi using Tkinter would create a general user interface.

These two programs, one for Raspberry Pi, the other for Arduino respectively, demonstrate how both devices exchange information back in forth in single bytes over I2C.

While the GPIO and I2C on Raspberry Pi are three volts, my Arduino Nano was operating at five volts. Raspberry Pi has it's own pull ups for I2C so don't use external resistors tied to five volts. The Arduino works just fine.

Note that the Arduino is operating in the SLAVE mode with Raspberry Pi as MASTER that limits Arduino's access to the I2C buss. I borrowed my serial LCD program and modified it for this demo. One could rewrite this to operate a non-serial LCD connection by re-writing the ssrWrite() routine and some changes in electrical connections.

For more on that see http://www.bristolwatch.com/arduino/arduino4a.html.

The codes are at rpi_arduino.txt.

This is a collection of programs and hardware hacks related to mainly Raspberry Pi and Debian Linux.