lcdMenu

A micropython library, which supports vertical and horizontal scrolling through menu items on both 2x16 and 4x20 liquid crystal displays

This project is the completely rewritten successor of my old (and now archived) ProgramChooser library.

It is now production-ready (tested on 2x16 displays only at the moment.) ToDo: Make the README.md also seem production ready!

Roadmap

• forward, backward and select button
• support for horizontal and vertical scrolling
• support for both 2x16 and 4x20 LCDs
• a reliable order of the menu items
• good documentation for all of this (maybe through examples)
• show an exit screen when a specific exit code is returned by a callback function
• make the menu itself exitable (to enable stuff like submenus, etc.)
• make the project a valid python package

Installation

To "install" the library on your Pico, clone the repository first using git clone. Open Thonny. There, open a file from "This computer" (thonny asks for the location after clicking on "Open"), and select the __init__.py from this repository. To get this file to your Pico's storage, choose "Save as" and choose "Raspberry Pi Pico" as the location.

Now, create a new directory called lcdMenu in the root of the Pico's file system (you can do that in the "magic" /lib folder too, makes no difference), and after that save the file there (with __init__.py being the file name).

Now you can use the library using import lcdMenu in any of your scripts!

Usage

For basic usage, you just have to create an LCD object, use it to create a lcdMenu along with some other arguments. On this newly created object, run the setup() method with your menu item list. Then, start the menu by calling the (blocking) run() method on it.

To stop a running instance of lcdMenu (started by run()), call the method stop() on it!

For further usage, see the comments above the respective method definition in question in the init.py file. These try to describe the behaviour of each parameter pretty precise. Also, have a look into the examples which can be found in the examples folder.

Gallery

Here are some of examples of how a lcdMenu will look, showcasing the amount of options you have with lcdMenu. Currently, as the library is only tested with 2x16 displays, these are the only ones showing up below - but on 4x20, it should look the same except it's bigger!

Scroll direction	Cycling	Title shown	Initial selection	Result
horizontal	yes	yes	first
vertical	yes	no	first
vertical	no	no	first
vertical	no	no	middle
vertical	no	no	last
vertical	no	yes	no options (first and last)
vertical	no	yes	first
vertical	no	yes	middle
vertical	no	yes	last

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-v3-or-later. A copy can be found here.