RPI and Grove Base Hat, how to get started?

Products & Technology Raspberry Pi
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Hi there
Please note that I have been using Raspberry PIs for several years now, incl. connecting various sensors, screens, etc., and so far I have had no trouble with it.

But I am new in the Grove world, so please bear with me.

I have a Raspberry 3 Model B, and I just bought a Grove Base Hat and a couple of sensors and the LED Bar.
I cant’ get that thing set up properly. I tried several ways:

  • Download the Raspbian for Robots image (Install the Image on The Raspberry Pi), and burn an SD card. That image would not start at all on my RPi.
  • With a virgin install of Bookworm 32bit on my RPi, I have tried to install the software myself following these steps: Setting Up The Software - Dexter Industries The install does not complete, e.g. when I run grove-ledbar.py it throws an di_i2c ModuleNotFoundError. Apparently something is missing.

Also, I did enable the I2C and the SPI bus, but the Grove Base Hat does not show up which sudo i2cdetect -y 1

Can someone help me to overcome these hurdles. Any hint is greatly appreciated!

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Welcome… I have to admit that i never tried to use Grove and Raspberry Pi together… I use Arduino IDE to program and never tried to program on Raspberry Pi so please continue to keep us up to date on your progress as I also would like to learn

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in the basic … grove is a modular 4 wire connector where one wire is ground… black one wire is 3v3 red and you have a data 0 - white and data 1 yellow… or vice versa… i cant remember… the grove data pins are mltiplexed gibing you many more options for connecting… only the IIC pins share a common bus… otherwide each grove connector connects a different pair of pins… so you have toi connec the grove connector which addresses the the pins you want and you have to use the software to read the pins from the port… hope that helps!

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Thanks!

I get the “layout” of the Grove Hat, but my initial problem is that I don’t even see it on the I2C bus. And the installation of the libraries (as described in the various “Get Started” guides) does not seem to work. Did anybody have success running the Grove Base Had to RPI and got the respective libraries installed. If so, what version of Raspbian did you use and which installation guide did you follow?

Thanks.

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yes i believe this may be kind of old information… i will see what i can find… like you said i think revisions of the Linux have made problems

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OK, I am one step further: I managed to get Dexter’s Raspian for Robots (Install the Image on The Raspberry Pi) running, and I now do see the HAT as 0x04 in “i2cdetect -y 1”. So far so good.

Now I want to run a test with the LED bar. The program itself (which I have copied from Grove - LED Bar | Seeed Studio Wiki) runs fine, but the LED bar does not light up. I have connected it to D5, but I also tried D16 (yes, I have changed the value in the program), but still nothing. (Note: I did NOT update the HAT firmware because I assume that it comes with the latest FW version. Is that assumption correct?)

Any ideas how to test the LED bar?

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Is it this one

You may want to check into this board and a XIAO to use
maybe a RP2040 would program in a similar way
or the SAMD will always work

that way you can troubleshoot

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Yes, its the Grove - LED Bar | Seeed Studio Wiki According to that web page it should work…

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Success: I used this script grove.py/grove/grove_ledbar.py at master · zolgear/grove.py · GitHub. But before it worked I had to correct the install of grove.py:

git clone https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/grove.py/
cd grove.py
sudo pip3 install .

For whatever reason that install does not find the bmm150 module, and since I don’t need the BMM150 compass module, I simply removed all references to it in the setup.py script.

So far so good. The next step is to recreate everything on Raspian BUSTER which - according to https://sethi.org/tutorials/tutorials-iot/setup-raspi-grove.html - seems to be the latest version of Raspbian that is compatible with the Dexter libraries. If that does not work I can always go back to the Raspian for Robots (which is based on STRETCH).

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