Update Your Pi to the Latest Raspbian

Your Pi will need to be running the latest version of Raspbian. This tutorial was written using Raspbian Stretch (Nov. 2018). Checkout our guide for Preparing an SD Card for your Raspberry Pi if you have not done so already. After the installation is complete be sure and run the following commands to make sure your installation packages are up to date. 

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Install pip3

pip3 is already installed with a full Raspbian installation, but the Raspbian Lite does not include pip3 so it needs to be installed as shown below.

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Install adafruit-blinka

sudo pip3 install adafruit-blinka

sudo pip3 install adafruit-blinka

Install adafruit-circuitpython-charlcd

sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-charlcd

sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-charlcd