Question(Advice wanted): External "display and control unit" with pi zero

Hardware
1

Hello,
I have:

  1. A Raspberry pi 4b with a keyboard, a camera and a unicorn hat connected
  2. An arduino Esplora that gives light sensor data to that pi via HC05 Bluetooth Serial and custom Program

Now i wanted to have some kind of device with a screen (not big, only text has to be displayed) and 2-6 Buttons, eventually more sensors.
I am planning to not to do this right now, but in ~1-2 Months due to the poor avalability of Microchips (and the high prices that is resulting in) atm.
Is something like this even possible with a pi zero wh and how can i do it??
Thanks
Aaron

2

You can connect the Pi Zero to any monitor/screen that has HDMI input.
Depending on what you want to display, you could connect a little SSD1306 OLED to something like a WeMos D1 mini and use MQTT to send msgs to the OLED or even connect it to the Pi.

What are you going to use it for?
What are you going to display on it?
What will the buttons control?
What are you running on the Explore?

You might think about picking up some WeMos D1 mini's and connect the sensors to them. Then use MQTT to send data to the Pi for processing.

But it all depends on what you are doing.

3
  1. See 2. and 3.
  2. I want to display e.g the state of above-mentioned arduino-based light sensor or the temperature (via two hue motion sensors) or some status info (CPU Temp, throttling and undervoltage state, etc) to see if my "main pi" is properly running
  3. I want to use the buttons to e.g control my lights or (via some nodes) my echo devices. I want the button being pressed to trigger an event in NR that i can use further
  4. On the Esplora, i'm running some code for detecting how bright it is in the room and send this to my "main pi" to control the light based on this value. I could attach a display to it, but it should be in another place than the esplora because of the sensor. I'll think of this as a kind-of temporary solution until i find some better solution for this.
    Btw: The Pi's GPIOs are used for a unicorn hat 8x8 LED Matrix and can't be used because of that
    Do the D1 mini's have an integrated Wi-Fi module or do i have to get an external one?
    Thanks
    Aaron
4

Yes they do. They are inexpensive and can be flashed with ESPeasy or Tasmota. Quite a few people on the forum use them as 'sort of remote slaves' to collect data or control things. As @zenofmud said, they support MQTT so it becomes very easy to "talk" to Node-RED.

https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1/d1_mini.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004527213280.html?spm=a2g0o.ppclist.product.6.5d85bg7Nbg7NY9&pdp_npi=2%40dis!GBP!￡1.94!￡1.57!!!!!%40211b5e1d16608849880951972e4f4b!12000029481036792!btf&_t=pvid:f2045481-0b9c-4691-9f3c-f3969c96af1f&afTraceInfo=1005004527213280__pc__pcBridgePPC__xxxxxx__1660884988

Note: There are loads of Wemos D1 Minis on AliExpress and Banggood. The above is just one example.

5

Hello @zenofmud, thanks for the fast answer. I'll look into getting some D1 mini's and trying it out.

6

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