Raspberry Pi: Displaying an RSS feed on an OLED display

The following Python code could be used to display the titles of an RSS feed on an OLED display, attached to a Raspberry Pi.

You need to install the Python “feedparser” package:

sudo apt-get install feedparser

Don’t forget to adjust the OLED wiring values in the “OLED initialization” part.

Then, call the script with two parameters:

./feed.py http://www.yourfeed.com/rss 10

where the first parameter is the URL to the RSS feed and the second one is the number of seconds after a new title will be displayed on the OLED.

And here is the whole script:

#!/usr/bin/python

import feedparser
import time
import sys

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO, time, os

import Adafruit_GPIO.SPI as SPI
import Adafruit_SSD1306
from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageDraw
from PIL import ImageFont

# --- Parameters:

feedUrl = sys.argv[1]
interval = sys.argv[2]

print "Feed: ", feedUrl
print "interval: ", interval

# --- OLED initialization:
RST = None
DC = 23
SPI_PORT = 0
SPI_DEVICE = 0

disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST)
disp.begin()
disp.clear()
disp.display()

def writeToDisplay(text):

    disp = Adafruit_SSD1306.SSD1306_128_32(rst=RST)
    disp.begin()
    disp.clear()
    disp.display()

    width = disp.width
    height = disp.height
    image = Image.new('1', (width, height))

    draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
    draw.rectangle((0,0,width,height), outline=0, fill=0)
    padding = -2
    top = padding
    bottom = height-padding
    x = 0
    font = ImageFont.load_default()


    temp = ""
    counter = 0
    top = 0
    for c in text:
        counter = counter + 1
        temp = temp + c
        if counter % 20 == 0:
            draw.text((x, top), temp, font=font, fill=255)
            temp = ""
            top = top + 8 

    disp.image(image)
    disp.display()


##########   Main ############

feedFeed = feedparser.parse(feedUrl)

for item in feedFeed["items"]:
        writeToDisplay(item["title"])
        print item["title"]
        time.sleep(float(interval))