Displaying text on OLED in Raspberry Pi - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Displaying text on OLED

📖 Scenario: You have a small OLED screen connected to your Raspberry Pi. You want to show a simple message on this screen, like a friendly greeting.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to write a short program that shows text on the OLED screen connected to your Raspberry Pi.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use the Adafruit_SSD1306 library to control the OLED screen

Create a variable to hold the text message

Initialize the OLED display

Show the text message on the OLED screen

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Small OLED screens are used in many gadgets like clocks, weather stations, and IoT devices to show information clearly in a tiny space.

💼 Career

Knowing how to control hardware displays is useful for embedded systems developers, IoT engineers, and hobbyists building interactive devices.

1

Set up the text message

Create a variable called message and set it to the string "Hello, OLED!".

Raspberry Pi

# Create a variable called message and set it to "Hello, OLED!"
# Your code here

Hint

Use simple quotes or double quotes to create the string.

2

Initialize the OLED display

Import Adafruit_SSD1306 and Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont from PIL. Then create an oled object for a 128x64 display using Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64(). Finally, call oled.begin() and oled.clear() to start the display.

Raspberry Pi

message = "Hello, OLED!"
# Import Adafruit_SSD1306 and PIL modules
# Create oled object for 128x64 display
# Initialize and clear the display
# Your code here

Hint

Remember to import all needed modules before creating the display object.

3

Draw the text on the OLED

Create a new image with mode '1' and size (128, 64). Create a draw object from this image. Use draw.text() to write the message at position (0, 0) with a default font. Then display the image on the OLED using oled.image() and oled.display().

Raspberry Pi

import Adafruit_SSD1306
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

message = "Hello, OLED!"

oled = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64()
oled.begin()
oled.clear()

# Create image and draw object
# Write message text at (0, 0)
# Display the image on the OLED
# Your code here

Hint

Use ImageFont.load_default() to get a simple font.

4

Show the message on the OLED

Run the program to see the text "Hello, OLED!" displayed on the OLED screen.

Raspberry Pi

import Adafruit_SSD1306
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

message = "Hello, OLED!"

oled = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_64()
oled.begin()
oled.clear()

image = Image.new('1', (128, 64))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
font = ImageFont.load_default()
draw.text((0, 0), message, font=font, fill=255)

oled.image(image)
oled.display()

# Run the program to display the message
# Your code here

Hint

Use print() to confirm the message was sent to the OLED.