Merry Christmas to everyone! Today’s hack is something that I’ve been planning to try out for a while: Using the Raspberry Pi as a (relatively inexpensive) “HDMI shield” for the Arduino microcontroller. While the Pi can easily do most things that the Arduino can and usually much more, one might have an otherwise complete project (for example, something related to home theater automation) that would benefit from HDMI output.
Arduino display shields are not the least expensive, so why not use a RaspPi instead? There have been hacks for using RaspPi as network shield, too, and this project is very much like it (actually, you could change the Pi-side code just a bit and have some network-related commands available for your Arduino in no time).
The basic hardware premise for this hack is very straightforward – wire the Pi and Arduino together using the serial interface available on both. Because Pi is 3.3V and Arduino 5V, a level converter is needed – I used one from Adafruit this time, as it’s dead simple to use and doesn’t pose the dangers of overloading Pi like my simple resistor option does (you might, however, check that link out as it contains the pinouts for RaspPi serial pins in the GPIO header).
On software side, the Pi acts as a “server”, taking simple display commands via serial link. You could even start the Pi server script and connect to the serial port with Putty, and the session could look a bit like the following:
# initialize viewport - not actually implemented yet
init 500 500
# draw a 10x10 rectangle at (5,15)
draw 5 15 10 10
# exit the server
exit
The python server uses pyserial for serial communications, currently at 9600 bps, but the Pi and Arduino should be able to do 115 200 as well. For graphics, pygame framework is used. Current version of code initializes a 500×500 pixel graphics viewport, but one could use the parameters given by “init” command from Arduino side to define that, too. The code should be rather straightforward to understand: there are only two supported commands, “draw” with four parameters, and “quit” to exit the otherwise infinite loop waiting for draw commands (I named the file ar2pi.py):
#!/usr/bin/env python
import serial
import string
import pygame
ser = serial.Serial("/dev/ttyAMA0",9600)
ser.open()
pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 500))
colour = pygame.Color("blue")
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False)
quit = False
while not quit:
line = ser.readline()
words = line.split()
if words[0] == "rect":
pygame.draw.rect(window, colour, (int(words[1]),
int(words[2]), int(words[3]), int(words[4])))
elif words[0] == "exit":
quit = True
pygame.display.flip()
ser.close()
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