How to Use Wio Terminal as a USB HMI for BeagleBoard SBC

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to use Seeed Studio Wio Terminal as a USB HMI display for BeagleBone.

Categories: Beginner

Originally published at https://www.hackster.io/ansonhe1997/how-to-use-wio-terminal-as-a-usb-hmi-for-beagleboard-sbc-78e6b9.

There is always a demand for display when it comes to SBC, and today I will show you how to use Seeed Studio Wio Terminal as a USB HMI display for BeagleBone SBC(BBG)!

Hardware Required

Wio Terminal Firmware

First, you will need to upload an Arduino program to your Wio Terminal via your PC.

There are two
examples
,
NullFunctional

and
USBDisplayAndMouseControl

:

1. If you want higher screen refresh rate on Wio Terminal, upload
NullFunctional
to Wio Terminal.

2. If you want
Wio Terminal to also act as a USB Mouse
, upload
USBDisplayAndMouseControl

to Wio Terminal.

uf2 Method

For convenience, we also provide
uf2
methods of uploading Wio Terminal’s firmware. Simply download the
uf2
files from below.

Entering the bootloader mode by sliding the power switch twice quickly. For more reference, please also see
here.

An external drive named
Arduino
should appear in your PC. Drag the the downloaded uf2 files to the
Arduino
drive.

Host Device Firmware

Now let’s set up the display driver on the host device and this is the BBG in this case:

sudo apt install --reinstall linux-headers-$(uname -r)
  • Download the display driver:
cd ~ 

git clone https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/seeed-linux-usbdisp
  • Make and build the driver:
cd ~/seeed-linux-usbdisp/drivers/linux-driver

make & sudo make install 

sudo reboot
  • Restart the device and firmware is loaded!

PtQtGraph Example

For more, you can use the
PyQtGraph

graph to simply draw you GUI with Wio Terminal with ease!

  • Let’s install dependencies for PyQtGraph first:
sudo apt update

sudo apt install python3 python3-distutils python3-pyqt5 python3-pip python3-numpy -y

sudo pip3 install pyqtgraph
  • Export macros for the screen:
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=linuxfb:fb=/dev/fb0

Note:
Where
fb0
is the first screen,
fb1
is second,
fb2
and so on. You may use
echo $QT_QPA_PLATFORM
to check the macros.

  • Copy the following PyQtGraph example python files and name it
    test.py
  • Run the example:
python3 test.py

Now when you run the PyQtGraph script, it work just fine!

You may run different PyQtGraph scripts on different screens as followed:

Further Development

Need a bigger screen? Need a higher resolution? Higher refresh rate? Please contact
produce@seeed.cc
for more information.

Resource

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