Count to Pi

STORY

I wanted to make a fun game that could be used to see how many Digits of Pi can be memorized. This is the game I came up with using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, 16×2 lcd with an i2c backpack and a 4×3 Keypad.

The enclosure

To hold all the parts together nicely I designed an enclosure in Autodesk Fusion 360. I then milled it out on my Shapeoko. You could 3d print it also or just use a cardboard box.

Wiring it up

The keypad has 7 wires that will wire up to the GPIO pins.

• 1 to GPIO 14 (pin 08)

• 2 to GPIO 15 (pin 10)

• 3 to GPIO 23 (pin 16)

• 4 to GPIO 24 (pin 18)

• 5 to GPIO 8 (pin 24)

• 6 to GPIO 27 (pin 13)

• 7 to GPIO 22 (pin 15)

To connect the LCD Display with i2c Backpack we need to use a logic level converter since its 5v and the Pi prefers 3.3V, I followed this guide here.

Setting up the Pi Zero W

I used a Pi Zero W so I could easily ssh in to it and modify the code. But If you have a non wireless Pi zero that will work also.

I loaded a clean image on an sd card, enabled SSH, enable i2c and configured my wireless information.

For interfacing with the keypad we will use pad4pi which can be installed by running this command

  sudo pip install pad4pi 

We will then create a directory for our program

mkdir countpi

Then put the pi.py, pivalue.ini, and I2C_LCD_driver.py files in that folder.

We also then want to set it up to run the program at boot up automatically. The Pi foundation has some info on how to do it here but I had issues with there guide and did it a tad different.

To edit the rc.local file type

sudo nano /etc/rc.local 

then scroll down to the bottom and put this in before exit 0.

cd /home/pi/countpi/ 
python pi.py & 
cd .. 

Then press ctrl+x, say yes to saving. Now reboot the Pi and you should see it start automatically.

How to play

To power it I used a usb cable powered from my computer. When the Pi boots up the screen should say lets count to Pi. You can then start entering the digits of Pi, we skip the decimal though.

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