GeeekPi GPIO Expansion Module with 3.5inch Screen for Raspberry Pi Pico 1/Pico 1 W and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Series

Absolutely love this board. Just add a pico board ($4-$10), install Thonny on your PC, and you're off and programming. Its a new board (2021) so not a lot of sample code yet. What there is showcases the main features and works like a charm though (12-bit a/d, interrupts, binary i/o, spi, sci, etc) Love it so much I bought five more for my students. Update after five months: Having spent the summer creating a college-level course around this board, I even more impressed. Nice crisp colorful graphics, easy to interface with sensors and actuators, and a very capable board. Couple this with a Python programmer like Thonny and you have a great teaching tool. Update: Lots of sample Python code for this board on Bison Academy

This is a great product to begin using a display. Works perfectly.

General thoughts on the board: Pros * Acrylic backplate is a nice touch and lets you (carefully) stand the whole board up on its side. * All included functions work fine (RGB led, regular leds, buttons, joystick, beeper, screen, etc) * Convenient access to all pico board pins. Cons * Only two user addressable regular LEDs. Having at least 4 user addressable would have been nice. * Acrylic backplate kind of a pain in the rear to install. * Confusing demo firmware distribution. You'll get a zip file with like 5 firmware files in it but only one will work properly. Sloppy. * Big con for me: The 320x480 resolution of the screen is just too large for the amount of RAM the pico has for fast display. Even with a RGB332 format that you convert to the screen's native RGB565 on transfer you're looking at 153600 bytes for a framebuffer plus another 512 bytes for the RGB332 to RGB565 lut. It's not a deal breaker because the screen certainly does work as shipped but if you were hoping for 30+ fps updates you will not find that here. The LVGL based demo shows you can do some simple gui interfaces but you'll notice the speed is quite low especially with FreeRTOS in there. For my purposes, I was able to get faster update speeds by using an internal 160x240 RGB332 framebuffer and using DMA and a PIO to pixel double the buffer horizontally and just doubling up the line draws vertically. That brings the internal framebuffer down to 38400 bytes which fits comfortably enough in the pico's ram. However, it also is halving the screen resolution so YMMV. tl;dr: Screen works nicely but limited ram makes it quite slow on the updates. However, you can hack around it depending on what you want to do with the display. Overall Happy with the purchase. Arrived quickly and it was well packaged. I appreciate the convenience of the thing for prototyping. The screen is too large for my performance desires, however.

This is a very cool breakout board for the Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s very much geared towards developing interactive media content (e.g. games!). It has a nice 320x480 full color touch screen that works very well (touch uses I2C on GP8 & 9, the display uses SPI on GP2, 3, 5, 6, 7). It also has a joystick (ADC0 & 1), two momentary push buttons (GP 14 & 15), a piezo buzzer (GP13), and a two tiny surface mount LEDs (on GP16 & 17), as well as a single WS2812 NeoPixel LED (GP12). The one thing it’s missing is the all-important “reset” button that the Pico should have been designed with and wasn’t. Most breakout boards add a “reset” button, so it’s kind of surprising this one didn’t. I like the size of the screen, the design is nice so you can easily hold it like a portable game system and press the joystick and buttons. It also comes with a simple acrylic base plate and some standoffs to mount it. The manual has a website you can type in, which has a lot of info, sample code, etc. It contains directions for how to get and compile the sample code from Linux repositories, or from a Github repository, or you can just download a zip file containing a few sample uf2 files that demonstrate the system (which is what I did, see pictures). There are a few sample codes, all of which are basically the same, but have different little bugs. The Github repository has all the source code, so you can learn from it. If you’re one of those people who uses their Pico to program games, GUIs for IoT apps, or even just cool data displays for sensors, this is a very value-added breakout board. Very cool -- even without the “reset” button. Final Rating: 5 stars!

Tried following the directions could not get the screen working if someone could help me please maybe I would change my review. I looked online, followed all the directions and still cannot get it to work

This board makes is very easy to experiment with your Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico 2. Just plug your Pico into the board, and you're connected to many I/O devices built in that you might otherwise have to cobble together on a breadboard to experiment with: LEDs, joystick, beeper, buttons, TFT screen. My only complaint is that the instructions to build the demo code assume you're using a Raspberry Pi, and are pretty terse. In my case, I just skipped that, installed Micropython, and started playing. Finally, the included acrylic backing is a nice touch that makes this feel more like a quality piece of equipment than a cheap board.

très intéressant/élégant kit pour developper et/ou pratiquer.. le programme de démo est sur le site et comme le pico devient un volume de mémoire à la connexion, il suffit de glisser le programme comme on fait avec une photo d’un dossier à l’autre, puis déconnecter et reconnecter le câble usb pour le lancer.. par contre ce démo n’est pas éditable (et la version python ne m’intéresse pas) préférant écrire en c++.. alors, je l’ai programmé avec Arduino IDE en utilisant ces 4 bibliothèques: SPI.h Adafruit_NeoPixel.h Adafruit_GFX.h Adafruit _ST7796S_kbv.h et ces bibliothèques contiennent suffisamment d’exemples pour comprendre comment utiliser le potentiel de cette carte.. les adresses pour les items (buzzer, leds, boutons poussoir, lcd, enfin tout) sont tel qu’indiqué sur le site du concepteur.. le joystick n’est pas précis quand il est relâché, il suffit de faire -500 (pour avoir le centre à zero) avec une compensation en X et Y, puis diviser par 10 pour le rendre moins instable et plus utile.. pour ma part, j’aurais préféré ne pas l’avoir ou avoir un potentiomètre ordinaire.. noter que le ADC du pico est de nature bruyant (12 bits vient avec "sensibilité") et donc, pour avoir une meilleure référence à zéro, il suffit d’activer un autre ADC dont l’entrée est mise à la masse, lire sa valeur qu’il suffira de soustraire pour avoir un bien meilleur "zero" comme valeur de référence.. j’ai lu dans mes recherches que pour un maximum "stable" il valait mieux utiliser un régulateur du genre 3.0v appliqué sur "Vref" (avec un Arduino sur 5v, on utilise le 3.3v déjà disponible pour faire la même chose pour le même problème de bruit).. je pense que le fabricant gagnerait à avoir de la compatibilité avec Arduino pour faciliter l’accès à cette grande communauté de ”potentiels acheteurs", ce kit est franchement élégant et intéressant.. et tout fonctionne..

Great little system that eases trying out various projects using a graphics screen

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Love it, I am a beginner and I could find many uses for it. Love this gadget!

I've been playing with this board a few months now and the C++ samples supplied at their website work. Those that want to use Micropython need to do a lot of seaching. For one thing not all the pinouts for the Touchscreen are talked about. The display part can use the ST7796 or ILI9488 Micropython librarys using SPI interface. The touch screen uses the GT911 interface chip at Address 5D using I2C. The Pinouts: EP-0172: 3.5" 64K colors TFT (IPS), 320 × 480 pixels, driver: ST7796 (SPI0: GP2:CLK, GP3:DIN, GP5:CS, GP6:DC, GP7:RST) EP-0172: 3.5" Capacitive Touch Screen, driver: GT911 (I2C0: GP8:SDA, GP9:SCL, GP10:RST, GP11:INT) One other thing to mention, you should use the RPI2350 instead of the RPI2040 because of processing power and memory. Google is your Friend.