If you have a spare evening and a urge to solder something this is a fantastic project, It has very little to do with me but combines 2 excellent tutorials to make a a great project.

The Hardware

The hardware is taken form Adafruits Learning system excellent tutorial it’s such an excellent tutorial I won’t repeat it here.

I built mine on veroboard as can be seen in the picture below

It follows the wiring diagram in the adafruit tutorial.

The Software

Software can be downloaded from the Blog here

Click on the link for english speakers and follow the instructions repeated below as root

     # mkdir rss

# cd rss

# wget http://raspberry-gpio-python.googlecode.com/files/python-rpi.gpio_0.3.1a-1_armhf.deb

# dpkg -i python-rpi.gpio_0.3.1a-1_armhf.deb

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9.tar.gz

# tar -zxvf setuptools-0.6c9.tar.gz

# cd setuptools-0.6c9/

# python setup.py build

# python setup.py install

# cd ..

# wget http://feedparser.googlecode.com/files/feedparser-5.1.2.tar.gz

# tar -zxvf feedparser-5.1.2.tar.gz

# cd feedparser-5.1.2/

# python setup.py install

# python setup.py install

# cd ..

# wget http://www.schnatterente.net/code/raspberrypi/rssreader.py

# chmod +x rssreader.py

When finished we need to just make a few adjustments to the rssreader.py file, open it up in your favorite editor

And replace the pin pin configurations with if using a raspberry pi Rev 0

DISPLAY_RS = 25

DISPLAY_E  = 24

DISPLAY_DATA4 = 23

DISPLAY_DATA5 = 17

DISPLAY_DATA6 = 21

DISPLAY_DATA7 = 22

If using a raspberry pi Rev 1 then replace with

DISPLAY_RS = 25

DISPLAY_E  = 24

DISPLAY_DATA4 = 23

DISPLAY_DATA5 = 17

DISPLAY_DATA6 = 27

DISPLAY_DATA7 = 22

Then change your RSS Feeds to the ones you want these are the BBC & RTE for example

FEEDURLS = ['http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=int', 'http://www.rte.ie/news/rss/news-headlines.xml']

and save the file recompile the script and run it as below:

# chmod +x rssreader.py

# sudo ./rssreader.py

You should now see the RSS reader starting up on your LCD