Pi Zero Phat Dac LCD Backpack question. No Serial Module?

Discussion Raspberry Pi
1

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on a pianobar project for a couple weeks and got stuck right at the end. I’ve asked several times on the adafruit forum but just get ignored. If anyone here has a tip I’d greatly appreciate it.

Pi Zero, Jessie Lite, Phat Dac and Negative 16 x 2 LCD Backpack display.

All of the hardware works great, especially the Phat Dac, and upon boot with a usb cable the LCDproc driver works fine.also running the lcdproc client works ok. In addition, on Arduino the example code provided by adafruit works as well.

The problem is when I boot the Pi Zero using serial I get gibberish, and when I run adafruit example code or any other python code I get the error (No Serial Module Found) and none of the code has any effect on the screen. Is the serial module something I missed on the adafruit git hub page?
Any ideas?

I realise this is a better question for adafruit but in two weeks they have ignored 3 separate questions regarding usage.

Jim

2

is this the product you are referring to?

If so, yes, that would require the Serial python module (sudo apt-get install python-serial).

Controlling the Pi over serial and communicating with the device would be mutually exclusive however - if you enable UART communication then the serial console with be corrupt, and vice versa.

3

after a quick scan of Adafruit’s github repository, the only relevant Python script I could see is this:

as you can see, it is trying to import the serial module. The command I pasted earlier will fix this, but again, you won’t be able to operate the Pi over serial at the same time.

4

Thank you so much for the info, Since I’ve gone back and forth so many times between serial and usb I’ll re check the serial and uart settings. If I have any other issues I’ll just start over with a fresh install of everything but keeping in mind your comments. I’ll post again later with the results.
Thanks again! Oh, and yes that is the display I’m using.

5

yes, sorry, I have overstated the case… if you are using the backpack over USB then there should be no problem disabling UART comm and get something sensible out of the serial console. the python serial module will happily do its job over USB.