Seeed Studio's Wio Terminal Gets a Display Driver, Turns Into a Tileable LCD for the Raspberry Pi

Seeed Studio has highlighted an unusual use case for its recently-launched Wio Terminal development system: a USB-connected full-color display for the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers.

"We could use the LCD on the Wio Terminal to display the Raspberry GUI just by connecting it to one of the USB ports on the Raspberry Pi," Seeed Studio's Lakshan explains of the project. "This becomes the Wio Terminal LCD, an HMI (Human Machine Interface) USB display for the Raspberry Pi."

"Furthermore, if you have more than one Wio Terminal, you could connect up to 4 Wio Terminals in total at the same time to the 4 USB ports available on the Raspberry Pi and set them to work in different modes such as Extend mode/ Mirror Mode. I also want to mention that this method not only works for Raspberry Pi, but also works for Nvidia Jetson Nano, BeagleBone, and Odyssey X86J4105 as well!"

The trick hinges around a USB Display library, compatible with the Arduino IDE, developed by Seeed. Once flashed onto a Wio Terminal and the unit connected to a compatible single-board computer, a driver is downloaded and compiled on the host system — turning it into a fully-functional, full-color LCD display.

There's a catch, of course: The Wio Terminal's 2.4" display has a mere 320x240 resolution, considerably smaller than the typical 1080p or maxed-out 4k resolution most users run their Raspberry Pis at. For that, Lakshan offers a solution: To use up to four Wio Terminals on a single Raspberry Pi to create a tiled display. Another use case has the Raspberry Pi use a traditional HDMI display as its primary output and use the Wio Terminal as a dedicated display for custom applications.

The full guide is available now on the Seeed Studio blog.