128×64 0.96 inch OLED Display for Raspberry Pi

This OLED is designed for Raspberry Pi computers, to give you a nice little display that you can use in your projects.

The PiOLED comes with a monochrome 128×64 OLED, with white pixels. The OLED uses only the I2C pins so you have plenty of GPIO connections available for buttons, LEDs, sensors, etc. It’s also nice and compact so it will fit into any case.

These displays are small, only about 1″ diagonal, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This screen is made of 128×64 individual white OLED pixels and because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness!

Using the display is very easy, there is an adafruit Python library for the SSD1306 chipset. Their is example code that allows you to draw images, text, whatever you like, using the Python imaging library. Tests showed 30 FPS update rates so you can do animations or simple video.

Comes completely pre-assembled and tested so you don’t need to do anything but plug it in and install our Python code! Works with any Raspberry Pi computer, including the original Pi 1, B+, Pi 2, Pi 3 and Pi Zero.

Feature:
Voltage: 3.3v
Interface: IIC
Color: White
Dimensions: 30mm x 30mm

The main chip is the popular SSD1306

Parts

Software

I used the adafruit https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_SSD1306. Open a command prompt on your Raspberry Pi and perform the following steps

Installing

sudo python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_SSD1306.git
cd Adafruit_Python_SSD1306
sudo python setup.py install

Example:

There are several interesting examples, I picked the stats example which displays

You simply type in the following

cd examples
sudo python stats.py

For reference here is the code of this example

[codesyntax lang=”python”]

import time

import Adafruit_GPIO.SPI as SPI
import Adafruit_SSD1306

from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageDraw
from PIL import ImageFont

import subprocess

# Raspberry Pi pin configuration:
RST = None     # on the PiOLED this pin isnt used
# Note the following are only used with SPI:
DC = 23
SPI_PORT = 0
SPI_DEVICE = 0

# Beaglebone Black pin configuration:
# RST = 'P9_12'
# Note the following are only used with SPI:
# DC = 'P9_15'
# SPI_PORT = 1
# SPI_DEVICE = 0

# 128x32 display with hardware I2C:
disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST)

# 128x64 display with hardware I2C:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64(rst=RST)

# Note you can change the I2C address by passing an i2c_address parameter like:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64(rst=RST, i2c_address=0x3C)

# Alternatively you can specify an explicit I2C bus number, for example
# with the 128x32 display you would use:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST, i2c_bus=2)

# 128x32 display with hardware SPI:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST, dc=DC, spi=SPI.SpiDev(SPI_PORT, SPI_DEVICE, max_speed_hz=8000000))

# 128x64 display with hardware SPI:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64(rst=RST, dc=DC, spi=SPI.SpiDev(SPI_PORT, SPI_DEVICE, max_speed_hz=8000000))

# Alternatively you can specify a software SPI implementation by providing
# digital GPIO pin numbers for all the required display pins.  For example
# on a Raspberry Pi with the 128x32 display you might use:
# disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST, dc=DC, sclk=18, din=25, cs=22)

# Initialize library.
disp.begin()

# Clear display.
disp.clear()
disp.display()

# Create blank image for drawing.
# Make sure to create image with mode '1' for 1-bit color.
width = disp.width
height = disp.height
image = Image.new('1', (width, height))

# Get drawing object to draw on image.
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)

# Draw a black filled box to clear the image.
draw.rectangle((0,0,width,height), outline=0, fill=0)

# Draw some shapes.
# First define some constants to allow easy resizing of shapes.
padding = -2
top = padding
bottom = height-padding
# Move left to right keeping track of the current x position for drawing shapes.
x = 0


# Load default font.
font = ImageFont.load_default()

# Alternatively load a TTF font.  Make sure the .ttf font file is in the same directory as the python script!
# Some other nice fonts to try: http://www.dafont.com/bitmap.php
# font = ImageFont.truetype('Minecraftia.ttf', 8)

while True:

    # Draw a black filled box to clear the image.
    draw.rectangle((0,0,width,height), outline=0, fill=0)

    # Shell scripts for system monitoring from here
    cmd = "hostname -I | cut -d\' \' -f1"
    IP = subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell = True )
    cmd = "top -bn1 | grep load | awk '{printf \"CPU Load: %.2f\", $(NF-2)}'"
    CPU = subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell = True )
    cmd = "free -m | awk 'NR==2{printf \"Mem: %s/%sMB %.2f%%\", $3,$2,$3*100/$2 }'"
    MemUsage = subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell = True )
    cmd = "df -h | awk '$NF==\"/\"{printf \"Disk: %d/%dGB %s\", $3,$2,$5}'"
    Disk = subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell = True )

    # Write two lines of text.

    draw.text((x, top),       "IP: " + str(IP),  font=font, fill=255)
    draw.text((x, top+8),     str(CPU), font=font, fill=255)
    draw.text((x, top+16),    str(MemUsage),  font=font, fill=255)
    draw.text((x, top+25),    str(Disk),  font=font, fill=255)

    # Display image.
    disp.image(image)
    disp.display()
    time.sleep(.1)

[/codesyntax]

As you can see it displays some interesting system monitoring