Waveshare LCD Test

A set of tests and utility functions for working with the Waveshare round 1.28 LCD + touch + RP2040 core + accelerometer.

setup

Install CircuitPython

First you need a recent version of CircuitPython on the device. You can get the latest version from here. Note that this is for the non-touch version of this board. There is no build for the touch version so you'll have to use this one and then add in the utils library from this repo.

To install CircuitPython (hereafter referred to as CP), you must reset the device to firmware mode by holding down the boot button while plugging it into USB on your computer. You will see a drive called RPI-RP2 appear on your computer. Note: this won't work if you have a battery plugged into the board. Disconnect the battery before trying this. Once you see the RPI_RP2 drive drag the downloaded .UF2 file to the drive. This will install CP and reboot. When you see the the CIRCUITPY drive it will be done.

Look at the boot_out.txt file on the CIRCUITPY drive to see if it is a recent version of CP. At the time of writing this readme, I am running CP 8.1 stable, and CP 8.2 beta should also work.

Install the lib and a simple test.

Copy waveshare128.py and code.py to the CP drive. It will reboot automatically. If you look at the console through whatever IDE you are using, or the command line (screen /dev/tty.usbmodemSOMETHING on MacOS), you will likely see an error about a missing module like gc9a01. This code requires some libraries. You can either download the full libraries and extract the ones you need by following this guide or use the circup command line tool to install them. I prefer circup, like this:

# list the currently installed modules
circup freeze
# install 
circup install gc9a01

Certain demos also need:

circup install adafruit_displayio_layout adafruit_button

Now you should see the boot text on the device's display, and then a white circle. You can drag the circle around with your finger on the touch screen. On the console you'll see constant output about the state of touches on the touch screen.

Examples

tilt.py draws a circle at the 'down' direction of the screen, using the accelerometer
touch.py draws a circle wherever you touch the screen
bignum_clock.py draws the time using large number sprites
earth.py draws static image of Earth from space
eyedraw.py Eye of Agamotto animation
kalidedraw.py drag finger on screen to draw with 4x kalidescope reflection
watch.py Beginnings of a multi-screen smart watch. Swipe left and right to switch screens

running the examples

Copy one of the example programs to /CIRCUIPY/code.py. Leave the libs as they are. Example: to run the Kalidascope drawing example, copy kalidedraw.py to code.py on your device.

customizing images

Some of the examples use images. You can replace them with your own, but make sure to use the same size and format them as indexed BMP files. Read more about CP BMP formats

Convert a PNG on disk to BMP

convert digits.png -colors 64 -type palette -compress None BMP3:digits.bmp

Then copy digits.bmp to the device drive

    # 3.7V 250mAh battery

voltage = value * 3.3 / 65535*2

currently reporting value = 9266, voltage is 0.8

switch back to BAT_ADC while charging getting 32920 to 328700 which equals voltage of 3.31 to 3.30 v or 100% while not charging: 27168 to 27200

5 min later 26500 26944

15 min later 26200

45min later 25000

20 min later: 24300,

so far, anything above 27000 seems to be charging. maybe anything over 30k? while charging it is over 30k. after running for over 4 hours w/ the screen dimmed to 0% but otherwise still running, it died at 22661. So we can say that is our minimum battery value.

probably should do a running average the last 10 measurements