rpi-TM1638 is (yet another) Raspberry Pi library (driver) for (chained) TM1638 boards like the 2$ cheap ones you can buy online.

It can be used with the LED&KEY (see photo), but also the QYF-TM1638 and JY-LKM1638 (they only differ from the number of switches on the board or the number of leds).

These boards have onboard eight 7-segment displays, 8 LEDs and 8 switches, both controlled by the TM1638 chip. You can control several TM1638 boards, and uses several LEDs, 7-segment displays and switches with only three (Clock, Data and Enable) GPIOs of your Raspberry Pi.

This library proposes:

• a low level support for the TM1638 chip
• a higher level support for the LED&KEY TM1638-based board (that can be easily used for the two other boards)

Just use pip to install the library

pip install rpi-TM1638

or clone the latest version on Github

Suppose you have two TM1638 boards, that share DataIO on GPIO19 and the clock on GPIO13. They have their STB plugged on GPIO 6 and 26. The following program turns on the LEDs #0 (3rd left of the 1st board) and #9 (2nd left of the 2nd board). It displays 12345678 on the first 7-segment display, and 2.3 on the 2nd one. It captures the #2 switch (3rd of the 1st board)

DIO = 19
CLK = 13
STB = 06, 26

TM = TMBoards(DIO, CLK, STB, 0)

TM.leds[3] = True
TM.leds[9] = True

TM.segments[0] = '12345678'
TM.segments[10] = '2.3'

a = TM.switches[2]

The rpi-TM1638 proposes a two-level API:

• The class TM1638s proposes low-level functions to manipulate the TM chips:
  • turnOn(brightness), turnOff and clearDisplay to turn on/off the displays, clear the displays or set the brightness
  • sendCommand and sendData to talk with the TM chip
  • plus some intern functions (to change the data mode, etc.)
• The class TMboards (that inherits from TM1638s) proposes somes methods to manipulate the LEDs, 7-segment displays and switches, with some getter/setter on the properties:
  • leds: for the leds
  • segments: for the 7-segment displays
  • switches: for the switches

To use the package, you just need to create a TMboards object or create a class that inherits from TMboards and proposes some high-level properties on top of it.