14 ms·

Add a dirt-cheap screen to the Raspberry Pi B+

188 points by nmilford 12y ago

freehunter 12y ago
This really should be the next thing the RPi team tackles, IMO. It's nice we have this great cheap computer, but trying to find a screen to plug into it is terrible. A computer monitor or TV is fine, but both of them draw too much power and are far too big and stationary. And have you seen the prices of small HDMI screens? I can buy a 8" Windows tablet, full PC mind you, for the price of a single 5" HDMI screen. Far too often I find myself saying "it shouldn't be this hard". Surely there exists a market for an adapter to plug an easily available iPhone screen into an RPi?
- vlunkr 12y ago
  That would be great. If you're starting from scratch, the display is likely to be the most expensive piece to get a pi running. Sure, you can plug it into a TV like the old days, but who has a TV that small anymore?
  - freehunter 12y ago
    And being able to run the Pi and the screen from a portable USB battery pack would be nice. It would help hobbyist projects (who wants a robot plugged into a wall?), it would help kids using them to learn (take your whole setup wherever you go), and it would help people in developing areas of the world (where there might not be an abundance of cheaply available and reliable power).
- fit2rule 12y ago
  This can't happen soon enough for me: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-laptop-you-build-yourself https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-lap... .. but then, this is also pretty usable for the same purpose: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6747 http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6747
  - nodata 12y ago
    You can buy this today: http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/hdmi/668gl/ http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/hdmi/668gl/
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Which costs $270 to be shipped to my house. That 10x what the Pi itself costs.
    - thenomad 12y ago
      That's a pro video monitor - considerable overkill for a Pi.
- Animats 12y ago
  If you want a screen, just buy a $50 tablet. The Raspberry Pi is basically a tablet computer chip minus the tablet.
  - teekert 12y ago
    + GPIO pins + FOSS software + Maker community, which make all the difference.
  - barbs 12y ago
    I see your point, but that's far less fun! :)
- teekert 12y ago
  I'm also still waiting for this one: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/21/pi-pads/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/21/pi-pads/ It looks like the official site is down atm but they mention an introduction in 2014 in their FAQ. It's a 640x480(!), 7" touchscreen.
  - tdicola 12y ago
    You can pick up a 7" touchscreen (1280x800) that works with a DPI display like this blog post mentioned right here: https://www.adafruit.com/products/2354 https://www.adafruit.com/products/2354
    - ics 12y ago
      The link you posted gives a resolution of 800x480.
- derekp7 12y ago
  What I'd like to see is a calculator shell that you could pop the RPi into, including physical buttons, lcd screen, battery and charger. My thinking -- most high schools require a graphing calculator, such as the TI 89 or similar, which is around $100 or so. Imagine if for that $100 you get something that can act as the same calculator, but morphs into a full computer when plugging in a keyboard/monitor? It may end up getting a lot more kids into programming that way.
  - Phlarp 12y ago
    And then you have to buy a graphing calculator anyway because no high school teacher / university professor will let you take tests with it.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Hell, I'm surprised some of my teachers let me use a graphing calculator one tests that didn't require them. They're already powerful enough to easily cheat with.
    - derekp7 12y ago
      Because of cheating? How can you use the Raspberry Pi (in a calculator shell) to cheat, in such a way that you can't use a ti-89 to cheat? Most cheating will be by either storing crib notes on the device (which won't do you any good in math if you don't understand the concepts), or by running a program to solve a problem for you, both of which the ti-89 is more than capable of doing -- that is its whole purpose, is to run math programs. The ideal situation would be where the RPi foundation uses its existing clout to get a PiCalc accepted as a standard calculator in school.
      - s73v3r 12y ago
        Wifi?
      - icebraining 12y ago
        During my high school exams, every calculator would get reset by a teacher/supervisor beforehand. Harder to do with such a device.
- pjc50 12y ago
  If you can tolerate PAL: http://www.dx.com/p/4-3-lcd-monitor-for-visual-reversing-vehicles-reverse-camera-ntsc-pal-73626 http://www.dx.com/p/4-3-lcd-monitor-for-visual-reversing-veh...
Someone1234 12y ago
This looks extremely fun, and I can see it being used for creating homemade mobile devices, and stand-alone packaged hardware. I will say fun and small size notwithstanding the current cost of doing this ($50) is a little high relative to just buying a super-low end LCD monitor ($85 for an 18" by Samsung, Asus, and Acer, $54 for a refurb from NewEgg). But I'm sure that misses most of the point... Just seems like the $30 for the 5" LCD is a little steep but maybe you're paying a premium because it is so small(?).
- robertely 12y ago
  [Author] The premium was mostly Adafruit markup and convenience. I'm totally not mad at the price, I received parts next day. If I really wanted to save money I would design an adapter board, and order bulk screens from China. Keep in mind this is prototype cost, typically inflated seriously because it's a one off.
  - paulgerhardt 12y ago
    How does this compare with some the Raspberry Pi screen kits from China? I see you can get a generic Pi LCD for $7.65, a 5" LCD with video in for $18.75, and a touchscreen Pi size kit for $19.90[1]. Going to the effort of breaking out DPI through the GPIO was quite creative. If optimized do you think these can hit sub $5? Either way, this was very clever. Thank you for taking the time to document this for others! [1] http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20150305102546&SearchText=5%22+tft http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB...
    - robertely 12y ago
      So, these are almost all crappy clones of this: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601 http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601 It's fine for static images and low quality video, but its using the SPI bus and a custom driver. This severely limits size of the display and/or refresh rate.
      - 12y ago
MichaelTieso 12y ago
This has been an issue for me for awhile. I've been scouting for screens for awhile for something cheap. I've been visiting GoodWill often as they have a large selection of monitors to choose from but most of them are far too large for a small screen. $15 is a great deal for a cheap monitor, but it takes up a huge amount of room.
rootbear 12y ago
The pi-s have a display interface connector for DSI panels, and they are planning to bring one out, but it seems to be taking a long time. The intent is that it will be very inexpensive, in line with their education focus. The resolution I saw mentioned was 800 x 480, like the one in this article. A bit small, but usable.
chisleu 12y ago
Maybe they can tackle the long-lived, widely-experienced SD card corruption issues of the RPi in the next version instead of adding a bunch more pins and an extra core. Meanwhile the competition even has eMMC in the same price range.
- tdicola 12y ago
  This comes up with every Pi post on HN for some reason, but if you're getting SD card corruption you either have a bad card (check the known good cards: http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards ) or are not shutting the Pi down correctly. You absolutely cannot just pull the power cord out while booted up because the SD card might be in the process of writing and you'll easily corrupt it. Make sure you always run 'sudo shutdown -h now' or something similar before powering down the Pi. I power up and down Pi's almost every day and have never corrupted an SD card.
  - UweSchmidt 12y ago
    Haven't had too many corrupted SD cards yet and a good process to recover (set up everything on a 4GB SD card, save the image on the PC using Win32diskimager, write image on 8GB SD cards using SDFormatter as needed (as SD cards vary in actual capacity and if you're a few bytes short your image won't fit, so just use a bigger one)). However, it seems that crashes are inevitable if you do hobbyist stuff with your RPis. Plug in funny things into your GPIO or USBs and run your own buggy code and you can't always shut it down properly.
  - fudged71 12y ago
    >You absolutely cannot just pull the power cord out while booted up because the SD card might be in the process of writing and you'll easily corrupt it. False. This depends on the software. We developed a system for the PrintToPeer Raspberry Pi OS that uses the RAMdisk for read/write operations, and makes the rest of the operating system read only. You can uplug it whenever and nothing is corrupted.
    - tdicola 12y ago
ceeK 12y ago
A friend of mine is currently working on a Raspberry Pi laptop, with a DIY kit. Quite similar. www.pi-top.com
agumonkey 12y ago
How many old laptops are thrown away ? They have nice LCD, and for 50$ I'd be tempted to snip a LCD controller on ebay. Less educational, more eco-friendly.
lbotos 12y ago
as an aside, the game on the screen is Gunstar Heroes which is an incredible side-scroller that everyone should play at least once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes
runewell 12y ago
It's truly amazing how someone can now put together a brand new computer for less than $100 with a bit of effort. I have the Raspberry Pi 2 and it's quite impressive, especially when running on an ARMv7-compatible Linux build.
makomk 12y ago
Wow, didn't know that you could do this with the Pi. People have been doing this with the Cubieboard since it came out[1], but to be honest I'd always assumed the Raspberry Pi display outputs were as tightly locked down behind the binary GPU blob as the CSI camera connector. [1] See for instance http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS - I believe it supports DPI as well as LVDS. script.fex is basically Allwinner's equivalent of the device tree.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  You were right, they ARE tightly locked behind ze blob. It took a Broadcom Senior Principal IC Designer (Gert Van Loo) to enable this interface, and it only happened because he made a VGA output board (vga666), he didnt even think about LCDs (something interface was designed for at the time this chip was landing in cellphones). I get the feeling DSI will never happen, or it will be as crippled as CSI - locked down with blob to working with one official product only.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This is an awesome post. A number of older laptop screens use this "standard" and you can just take off the screen and repurpose it. The trick is that sometimes the flex cable between the screen and the laptop has extra stuff on it. Time to go panel hunting for some more panels :-)
- rootbear 12y ago
  I was wondering recently what the interface is on my old Nokia N800 tablet, for just this reason, but I'm reluctant to take it apart to find out. And I still have a soft spot for my trusty old N800. I also have an XO-1 OPLC laptop, but it has a funky display. Hmm. I have an old IBM T60 in my junk pile, maybe that could be used...
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Heh, if you want a matching XO-1 I've got a spare :-)
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  'standard' is lvds, you will need Flatlink transmitter chip, for example SN75LVDS84 second part of my earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9155677&goto=item%3Fid%3D9151928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9155677&goto=item%3Fid%...
gourneau 12y ago
For about the same price ($60) you can get this fancy little HDMI display http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260 For $20 more it comes with a touch screen. It is great for little BBB or RPi projects, zero config required for the BBB.
- mark-r 12y ago
  The price I get at the link shows $60 only if you're buying 100 at a time, it's $75 for one. Still nice to know about though.
  - xrjn 12y ago
    You can get them for under $20 if you buy them from China http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-LCD-module-Pi-TFT-2-8-inch-320-240-Touchscreen-Display-Module-TFT-for/1362008_1969913024.html http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-LCD-mo...
    - danellis 12y ago
      You're comparing 5" with 2.8", though.
  - gourneau 12y ago
    I linked to the touchscreen version by mistake. This is the non-touch version is $59 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2232 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2232
vwruetag 12y ago
I'm aware that this is not comparable to a 800x480 display but if you just want to output some simple monochrome graphics the 1.6" Nokia 3310/5110 Displays are quite nice. Very easy to drive and really dirt cheap - they can be found for about $3!
ilaksh 12y ago
I can get a whole Android tablet for $60 with higher resolution. Why cant I buy just the screen for $25? Basically take the tablet manufacturing process and remove most of the stuff thats not a screen and add HDMI.

188 points by nmilford 12y ago

This really should be the next thing the RPi team tackles, IMO. It's nice we have this great cheap computer, but trying to find a screen to plug into it is terrible. A computer monitor or TV is fine, but both of them draw too much power and are far too big and stationary. And have you seen the prices of small HDMI screens? I can buy a 8" Windows tablet, full PC mind you, for the price of a single 5" HDMI screen. Far too often I find myself saying "it shouldn't be this hard". Surely there exists a market for an adapter to plug an easily available iPhone screen into an RPi?

vlunkr 12y ago
That would be great. If you're starting from scratch, the display is likely to be the most expensive piece to get a pi running. Sure, you can plug it into a TV like the old days, but who has a TV that small anymore?
- freehunter 12y ago
  And being able to run the Pi and the screen from a portable USB battery pack would be nice. It would help hobbyist projects (who wants a robot plugged into a wall?), it would help kids using them to learn (take your whole setup wherever you go), and it would help people in developing areas of the world (where there might not be an abundance of cheaply available and reliable power).
fit2rule 12y ago
This can't happen soon enough for me: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-laptop-you-build-yourself https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pi-top-a-raspberry-pi-lap... .. but then, this is also pretty usable for the same purpose: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6747 http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6747
- nodata 12y ago
  You can buy this today: http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/hdmi/668gl/ http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/hdmi/668gl/
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Which costs $270 to be shipped to my house. That 10x what the Pi itself costs.
  - thenomad 12y ago
    That's a pro video monitor - considerable overkill for a Pi.
Animats 12y ago
If you want a screen, just buy a $50 tablet. The Raspberry Pi is basically a tablet computer chip minus the tablet.
- teekert 12y ago
  + GPIO pins + FOSS software + Maker community, which make all the difference.
- barbs 12y ago
  I see your point, but that's far less fun! :)
teekert 12y ago
I'm also still waiting for this one: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/21/pi-pads/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/21/pi-pads/ It looks like the official site is down atm but they mention an introduction in 2014 in their FAQ. It's a 640x480(!), 7" touchscreen.
- tdicola 12y ago
  You can pick up a 7" touchscreen (1280x800) that works with a DPI display like this blog post mentioned right here: https://www.adafruit.com/products/2354 https://www.adafruit.com/products/2354
  - ics 12y ago
    The link you posted gives a resolution of 800x480.
derekp7 12y ago
What I'd like to see is a calculator shell that you could pop the RPi into, including physical buttons, lcd screen, battery and charger. My thinking -- most high schools require a graphing calculator, such as the TI 89 or similar, which is around $100 or so. Imagine if for that $100 you get something that can act as the same calculator, but morphs into a full computer when plugging in a keyboard/monitor? It may end up getting a lot more kids into programming that way.
- Phlarp 12y ago
  And then you have to buy a graphing calculator anyway because no high school teacher / university professor will let you take tests with it.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Hell, I'm surprised some of my teachers let me use a graphing calculator one tests that didn't require them. They're already powerful enough to easily cheat with.
  - derekp7 12y ago
    Because of cheating? How can you use the Raspberry Pi (in a calculator shell) to cheat, in such a way that you can't use a ti-89 to cheat? Most cheating will be by either storing crib notes on the device (which won't do you any good in math if you don't understand the concepts), or by running a program to solve a problem for you, both of which the ti-89 is more than capable of doing -- that is its whole purpose, is to run math programs. The ideal situation would be where the RPi foundation uses its existing clout to get a PiCalc accepted as a standard calculator in school.
    - s73v3r 12y ago
      Wifi?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      During my high school exams, every calculator would get reset by a teacher/supervisor beforehand. Harder to do with such a device.
pjc50 12y ago
If you can tolerate PAL: http://www.dx.com/p/4-3-lcd-monitor-for-visual-reversing-vehicles-reverse-camera-ntsc-pal-73626 http://www.dx.com/p/4-3-lcd-monitor-for-visual-reversing-veh...

Someone1234 12y ago

This looks extremely fun, and I can see it being used for creating homemade mobile devices, and stand-alone packaged hardware. I will say fun and small size notwithstanding the current cost of doing this ($50) is a little high relative to just buying a super-low end LCD monitor ($85 for an 18" by Samsung, Asus, and Acer, $54 for a refurb from NewEgg). But I'm sure that misses most of the point... Just seems like the $30 for the 5" LCD is a little steep but maybe you're paying a premium because it is so small(?).

robertely 12y ago
[Author] The premium was mostly Adafruit markup and convenience. I'm totally not mad at the price, I received parts next day. If I really wanted to save money I would design an adapter board, and order bulk screens from China. Keep in mind this is prototype cost, typically inflated seriously because it's a one off.
- paulgerhardt 12y ago
  How does this compare with some the Raspberry Pi screen kits from China? I see you can get a generic Pi LCD for $7.65, a 5" LCD with video in for $18.75, and a touchscreen Pi size kit for $19.90[1]. Going to the effort of breaking out DPI through the GPIO was quite creative. If optimized do you think these can hit sub $5? Either way, this was very clever. Thank you for taking the time to document this for others! [1] http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20150305102546&SearchText=5%22+tft http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB...
  - robertely 12y ago
    So, these are almost all crappy clones of this: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601 http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601 It's fine for static images and low quality video, but its using the SPI bus and a custom driver. This severely limits size of the display and/or refresh rate.
    - 12y ago

MichaelTieso 12y ago

This has been an issue for me for awhile. I've been scouting for screens for awhile for something cheap. I've been visiting GoodWill often as they have a large selection of monitors to choose from but most of them are far too large for a small screen. $15 is a great deal for a cheap monitor, but it takes up a huge amount of room.

rootbear 12y ago

The pi-s have a display interface connector for DSI panels, and they are planning to bring one out, but it seems to be taking a long time. The intent is that it will be very inexpensive, in line with their education focus. The resolution I saw mentioned was 800 x 480, like the one in this article. A bit small, but usable.

chisleu 12y ago

Maybe they can tackle the long-lived, widely-experienced SD card corruption issues of the RPi in the next version instead of adding a bunch more pins and an extra core. Meanwhile the competition even has eMMC in the same price range.

tdicola 12y ago
This comes up with every Pi post on HN for some reason, but if you're getting SD card corruption you either have a bad card (check the known good cards: http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards ) or are not shutting the Pi down correctly. You absolutely cannot just pull the power cord out while booted up because the SD card might be in the process of writing and you'll easily corrupt it. Make sure you always run 'sudo shutdown -h now' or something similar before powering down the Pi. I power up and down Pi's almost every day and have never corrupted an SD card.
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  Haven't had too many corrupted SD cards yet and a good process to recover (set up everything on a 4GB SD card, save the image on the PC using Win32diskimager, write image on 8GB SD cards using SDFormatter as needed (as SD cards vary in actual capacity and if you're a few bytes short your image won't fit, so just use a bigger one)). However, it seems that crashes are inevitable if you do hobbyist stuff with your RPis. Plug in funny things into your GPIO or USBs and run your own buggy code and you can't always shut it down properly.
- fudged71 12y ago
  >You absolutely cannot just pull the power cord out while booted up because the SD card might be in the process of writing and you'll easily corrupt it. False. This depends on the software. We developed a system for the PrintToPeer Raspberry Pi OS that uses the RAMdisk for read/write operations, and makes the rest of the operating system read only. You can uplug it whenever and nothing is corrupted.
  - tdicola 12y ago

ceeK 12y ago

A friend of mine is currently working on a Raspberry Pi laptop, with a DIY kit. Quite similar. www.pi-top.com

agumonkey 12y ago

How many old laptops are thrown away ? They have nice LCD, and for 50$ I'd be tempted to snip a LCD controller on ebay. Less educational, more eco-friendly.

lbotos 12y ago

as an aside, the game on the screen is Gunstar Heroes which is an incredible side-scroller that everyone should play at least once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes

runewell 12y ago

It's truly amazing how someone can now put together a brand new computer for less than $100 with a bit of effort. I have the Raspberry Pi 2 and it's quite impressive, especially when running on an ARMv7-compatible Linux build.

makomk 12y ago

Wow, didn't know that you could do this with the Pi. People have been doing this with the Cubieboard since it came out[1], but to be honest I'd always assumed the Raspberry Pi display outputs were as tightly locked down behind the binary GPU blob as the CSI camera connector. [1] See for instance http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS - I believe it supports DPI as well as LVDS. script.fex is basically Allwinner's equivalent of the device tree.

rasz_pl 12y ago
You were right, they ARE tightly locked behind ze blob. It took a Broadcom Senior Principal IC Designer (Gert Van Loo) to enable this interface, and it only happened because he made a VGA output board (vga666), he didnt even think about LCDs (something interface was designed for at the time this chip was landing in cellphones). I get the feeling DSI will never happen, or it will be as crippled as CSI - locked down with blob to working with one official product only.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This is an awesome post. A number of older laptop screens use this "standard" and you can just take off the screen and repurpose it. The trick is that sometimes the flex cable between the screen and the laptop has extra stuff on it. Time to go panel hunting for some more panels :-)

rootbear 12y ago
I was wondering recently what the interface is on my old Nokia N800 tablet, for just this reason, but I'm reluctant to take it apart to find out. And I still have a soft spot for my trusty old N800. I also have an XO-1 OPLC laptop, but it has a funky display. Hmm. I have an old IBM T60 in my junk pile, maybe that could be used...
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Heh, if you want a matching XO-1 I've got a spare :-)
rasz_pl 12y ago
'standard' is lvds, you will need Flatlink transmitter chip, for example SN75LVDS84 second part of my earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9155677&goto=item%3Fid%3D9151928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9155677&goto=item%3Fid%...

gourneau 12y ago

For about the same price ($60) you can get this fancy little HDMI display http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260 For $20 more it comes with a touch screen. It is great for little BBB or RPi projects, zero config required for the BBB.

mark-r 12y ago
The price I get at the link shows $60 only if you're buying 100 at a time, it's $75 for one. Still nice to know about though.
- xrjn 12y ago
  You can get them for under $20 if you buy them from China http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-LCD-module-Pi-TFT-2-8-inch-320-240-Touchscreen-Display-Module-TFT-for/1362008_1969913024.html http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-LCD-mo...
  - danellis 12y ago
    You're comparing 5" with 2.8", though.
- gourneau 12y ago
  I linked to the touchscreen version by mistake. This is the non-touch version is $59 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2232 http://www.adafruit.com/products/2232

vwruetag 12y ago

I'm aware that this is not comparable to a 800x480 display but if you just want to output some simple monochrome graphics the 1.6" Nokia 3310/5110 Displays are quite nice. Very easy to drive and really dirt cheap - they can be found for about $3!

ilaksh 12y ago

I can get a whole Android tablet for $60 with higher resolution. Why cant I buy just the screen for $25? Basically take the tablet manufacturing process and remove most of the stuff thats not a screen and add HDMI.