Another fun project using Pimoroni Inky What and Pimoroni Button Shim to create a display to show several items. Main purpose is to have fun but also to have a demo project to get some experience on two subject:
- TDD : Test Driven Development (in this case using Python)
- Remote Development on Raspberry PI: since I think TDD is a bit of a challenge to do locally on the Raspberry PI I would like to use a IDE that enables me to develop on the Mac and deploy to the Raspberry Pi
First challenge will be to expand on what I want to achieve before I just start to code
A Rapsberry Pi 4 with 4 GB, A Pimoroni Inky What and a Pimoroni Button Shim. This combination should be able to:
- show several 'panels' with information
- use buttons to change what is displayed
- on bootit should have predictable behaviour and show a nice display
I started out with problems because the button shim has bad connections when not soldered :-( See resources to find out the five pins that need to be soldered
What framework to use? Also, it would be nice to be able to test functionality without having the Pi available. A smalle web-interface with the buttons and an image to show the result for the Inky What would be really cool. Challenge foor TDD will be to start really small :-) and where to start, with the browser variant or with the Inky What
Since I already use VSCode it seemed logical to try what was possible. I found this great article from Scott Hanselman on Visual Studio Remote Development over SSH to Raspberry PI. I already use the VSCode Remote Development extension so this was a breeze to setup and it worked without any glitch. I also installed a common Python Extension (ms-python.python) and Python Test Explorer ( littlefoxteam.vscode-python-test-adapter) to try this for doing TDD
The Inky What has a nice library which essentially only allows you to show a PIL image at once. This image can be created using the PIL (or more moder pillow) library. What I would like is an additional abstraction layer that makes it possible to: * divide the What display in several 'panels' that together form te total diaplay area
- it should be possible to manipulate the separate panels
- combining panels into the total image should be transparant
- exporting image to png to be able to show in browser
- the library should have no knowledge of Inky What (the interface is the image)
- (Pimoroni Buttonshim)[https://github.com/pimoroni/button-shim]
- (Pimoroni What)[https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-inky-what]
- (Inky Python Library)[https://github.com/pimoroni/inky]
- PIL or pillow[https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/ImageDraw.html]
- (Pin layout)[https://pinout.xyz/pinout/button_shim#] of Button Shim
Since I need something that works and something that 'moves' I will start easy.
- create a Github project
- basic README.md with goals
- switch to IDE with remote development
- combine What example for displaying images and Buttonshim example and allow to change pictures using button press
- start working on 'panel' interface with just one panel and show the image using TDD approach
- repeat
- web-interface