Compile lcdproc hd44780 driver on Raspberry Pi running Debian Stretch

In order to get my 20×4 LCD display with cheap IIC/I2C/TWI/SPI Serial Interface Board running on Raspberry Pi I had to use patched hd44780.so file downloaded from NeighborGeek. You can check it out here

This worked fine on my RPi3 running Debian Jessie, but recently I have upgraded to Stretch and found out that his driver now is having issues. After running for longer period of time the screen would be full of garbage characters.

I thought I could repeat the steps, download source, patch the source, compile and use again hd44780.so file instead of the one provided by distribution.

First thing I did was to download latest source from GitHub:

wget https://github.com/lcdproc/lcdproc/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd lcdproc-master

Now I tried to apply the hd44780-i2c.c patch but it failed. Then I checked the hd44780-i2c.c file in the source I found out that patch is no longer needed just proper configuration in LCDd.conf.

In order to compile the latest driver from GitHub following steps are needed:

./autogen.sh
./configure --disable-libusb --disable-libusb-1-0 --enable-drivers=hd44780 --disable-libftdi
make

After you have compiled the driver, go to directory:

 cd /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lcdproc/

and backup existing file just in case something goes wrong:

cp hd44780.so hd44780.so.orig

Then copy the newly compiled driver in proper place:

cp /usr/local/src/lcdproc-master/server/drivers/hd44780.so .

Edit LCDd.conf and add the following after hd44780 part:

i2c_line_RS=0x01
i2c_line_RW=0x02
i2c_line_EN=0x04
i2c_line_BL=0x80
i2c_line_D4=0x10
i2c_line_D5=0x20
i2c_line_D6=0x40
i2c_line_D7=0x80
Backlight=yes
BacklightInvert=yes

You can download my newly compiled driver and LCDd.conf from this link  hd44780_debian_stretch.

I hope this has saved you some time and got your 20×4 LCD working with Debian Stretch.

Update

I have moved my LCD display to Pine64 SBC and since this is different architecture I needed to re-compile it using the same steps as above.

You can dowload aarch64 version hd44780.so aarch64.

Configure LCDd.conf for LC16M VFD LCD 16×2 screen

I wanted to reinstall my old XBMCuntu distro with new version from kodi.tv and I have downloaded latest available iso file from here.

Since my Silverstone LC16M case has 16×2 VFD display it is normal that I want to use it together with all the multimedia keys. In order to get them working kernel module imon must be loaded.

To support LCD in Kodi you will need addon XBMC LCDproc but before installing the plugin you need to have lcdproc package installed and configured. Continue reading “Configure LCDd.conf for LC16M VFD LCD 16×2 screen”