Connect the Raspberry Pi Pico to an OLED using Grove breakouts

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In this short article you'll learn how to make and use a compact, inexpensive adapter that will allow you to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico/PicoW to Grove I2C peripherals. With a Grove to Stemma QT/Kwiic adapter cable, you can also connect your Pico/PicoW to Adafruit and Sparkfun I2C devices.

You'll laso learn a useful hack that lets you connect the 2mm spaced Grove adapters to a 0.1" spaced (2.54mm) pcb.

Grow with Grove

Regular readers will know I love breakout boards.

One of the projects that I've been working on is a Raspberry Pi Locator. It reads updates from the @rpilocator RSS feed, and it tells you when and where Raspberry Pi stock is available. The Pico W will sound a buzzer when there's stock around, but it would be great if it could tell you which stores had the Pis. On OLED display would keep things compact, and I thought I'd hook one up.

Seeed studios have a great range of Grove breakouts with an easy-to-use connection system, and I knew I had some Grove-compatible I2C OLEDs in my parts stock.

Then I realized I'd need an adapter to connect the Pico to the OLED.

I have a few of Pimoroni's Pico proto boards, and I wondered if I use one as a base for a Grove connector.

After a few false starts I had a soldered connector. Soldering the board is a little fiddly, but it's not too bad if you add the components in the right order.

Here's the parts list:

1 Pimoroni Pico proto board. 2 x 20 way 0.1" female headers 2 x 2.7K ohm resistors. Anything from 2.2k to 5.6K would work just as well 1 Grove connector Tinned copper wire and white, yellow, red and black hookup wire.

Here's the schematic:

image

Begin by soldering two lots of bridge wires between successive strips of the Pico proto.

Next, cut and solder wires from the proto inner edge of the proto to the relevant strips,

There are four of those connections.

The white wire caries SDA, the I2C data signal. The yellow wire carries SCL, the I2C clock signal. The red wire carries 3.3 volts. The black is 0v (Ground).

After that, solder the Grove connector. Make sure you have it the right way around! Since its legs are 2mm apart, you need to splay them out slightly to fit the 0.1" spacing of the Pico proto.

Finally, solder the female headers to the board. Make sure the board is the right way up!

The easiest way to solder female headers is to use a breadboard with two rows of male headers plugged in. Then push the female headers onto the th male header pins and place the Pico proto board on top of the female headers.

Now it's easy to solder the board to the female headers.

image

Time to test the board!

Checking I2C

Connect the OLED (or whatever I2C device you plan to use) using a standard Grove cable.

Next, run the following program on your Pico.


# We're using I2C0 with SDA on Pin 0, SCL on pin 1

import machine
i2c = machine.I2C(0, scl=machine.Pin(1), sda=machine.Pin(0))

print('Scanning')
devices = i2c.scan()

if len(devices) == 0:
  print("No i2c devices found!")
else:
  print('%d i2c device(s) found:'% len(devices))

  for device in devices:  
    print("address: %d - 0x%X" % (device, device))

It should list all the I2C devices it finds on the Pico's I2C bus 0.

I used Grove 128x128 pixel monochrome OLED based on the SH1107 display. After a little searching I found a MicroPython driver for it.

I installed the driver on the Pico and ran this test:


import sh1107
import machine


i2c = machine.I2C(0, scl=machine.Pin(1), sda=machine.Pin(0))
oled = sh1107.SH1107_I2C(128, 128, i2c)

oled.text('MicroPython', 10, 0)
oled.text('I2C + Pico', 10, 16)
oled.text('+ Grove', 10, 32)
oled.show()

And voila:

image

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