Pi-Lite

It is a little strange to be posting about Pi-Lite.  It is a Raspberry Pi add-on which I received in 2015.  I picked it up and tried it out after a gap of a few years and I was again struck by what a lovely little product it is.  It came from a company called Ciseco which folded in about 2017 so the original documentation is no longer available.  However Matt Hawkins produced a tutorial I used at the time for familiarisation and he (his site anyway) is still around so I was able to find what I needed.

The board is simply a set of 14x9 monochrome LEDs which can be used to display images or scrolling text.  It is connected to the RPi using a serial UART and just needs to be plugged straight in to the RPi or 4 pin TX, RX, 5V and GND connections.  LEDs are controlled by an ATmega328 chip on the board which accepts commands input from the serial port and changes the displays accordingly. You can program individual pixels, bars, or download a 14x9 pixel image using commands.  By default information downloaded is treated as text characters and scrolls across the display as a message, which you can speed up or slow down.

To try out the board you start up minicom, a simple terminal emulator.  Any text you type in is displayed on the Pi_lite as scrolling text.  It makes more sense to control the display using a program and python-serial is a good way of doing this.  Matt Hawkins / Ciseco provide some good demos.  A stock ticker and weather report would have been fun but their data sources no longer work.

Pi-Lite doesn't have to be connected to an RPi, it works equally well on a PC serial port (with appropriate convertor).   Of course you may not be satisfied with the commands provided on the ATmega328 and will probably have already realised this is an Arduino processor.  You can modify the inbuilt program using the Arduino IDE to amend the Pi-Lite sketch.  Alternatively you can write your own sketch using the Pi-Lite Arduino library to control the display however you want.