You'll need to install the Adafruit_Blinka library that provides the CircuitPython support in Python. This may also require enabling I2C on your platform and verifying you are running Python 3. Since each platform is a little different, and Linux changes often, please visit the CircuitPython on Linux guide to get your computer ready!

Python Installation of SSD1305 Library

Once that's done, from your command line run the following command:

• pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-ssd1305

If your default Python is version 3 you may need to run 'pip' instead. Just make sure you aren't trying to use CircuitPython on Python 2.x, it isn't supported!

If that complains about pip3 not being installed, then run this first to install it:

• sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Pillow Library

We also need PIL, the Python Imaging Library, to allow using text with custom fonts. There are several system libraries that PIL relies on, so installing via a package manager is the easiest way to bring in everything:

• sudo apt-get install python3-pil

That's it. You should be ready to go.

Speeding up an I2C Display on Raspberry Pi

For the best performance, especially if you are doing fast animations, you'll want to tweak the I2C core to run at 1MHz. By default it may be 100KHz or 400KHz

To do this edit the config with sudo nano /boot/config.txt

and add to the end of the file

dtparam=i2c_baudrate=1000000

reboot to 'set' the change.