Breakout Garden and ST7735

Support
1

A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Breakout garden and the ST7735 display. I connected them to a 3B+ I had laying around, installed Buster, enabled SPI and I2C and downloaded the Breakout Garden software. I ran the installed and got “Sorry! I couldn’t find any breakouts!”. Reviewed the installer and realised it just installs software for a small subset of breakouts and a bit of Googling found people who were just installing the drivers. So I installed the ST7735 SPI-related bits and the Python library.

I couldn’t get anything to work on the display. I tried both slots and even tried turning it around even thought the pins and slots are clearly labelled. The one thing I did notice is that as soon as power is applied to the Pi, the backlight on the ST7735 comes on.

I also tried a 3B with a fresh install, repeated the above and got the same results. After some more Googling I made no progress to make it work. Short of getting the soldering iron out I had no practical way of working out if the ST7735 or the Hat were faulty so I decided to buy a BME280 as a test and that works fine in the Breakout garden

I was about to buy an SPI breakout (that I probably don’t need) but I thought I’d post on here instead to see if there’s any suggestions of other things I could try. I’m assuming the ST7735 is faulty but there could be some other thing I have to do to get the SPI devices working.

Thanks for any suggestions

Steve

P.S. Is there an i2cdetect for SPI devices? I couldn’t find a way to tell if the Pi can actually see the ST7735.

2

The install instructions, for Python, are here.

If you have done all that, post back and we will dig deeper.
The scrolling text example is likely a good test file to run.

As far as I know there is no equivalent to i2cdetect, for SPI devices.

3

I’ve installed those - I do mention that in my post.

So I installed the ST7735 SPI-related bits and the Python library.

4

I wasen’t shure if you had installed the Pimoroni versions.