raspberry pi 4 lcd screen free sample

Rather than plug your Raspberry Pi into a TV, or connect via SSH (or remote desktop connections via VNC or RDP), you might have opted to purchase a Raspberry Pi touchscreen display.

Straightforward to set up, the touchscreen display has so many possibilities. But if you"ve left yours gathering dust in a drawer, there"s no way you"re going to experience the full benefits of such a useful piece of kit.

The alternative is to get it out of the drawer, hook your touchscreen display to your Raspberry Pi, and reformat the microSD card. It"s time to work on a new project -- one of these ideas should pique your interest.

Let"s start with perhaps the most obvious option. The official Raspberry Pi touchscreen display is seven inches diagonal, making it an ideal size for a photo frame. For the best results, you"ll need a wireless connection (Ethernet cables look unsightly on a mantelpiece) as well as a Raspberry Pi-compatible battery pack.

Several options are available to create a Raspberry Pi photo frame, mostly using Python code. You might opt to script your own, pulling images from a pre-populated directory. Alternatively, take a look at our guide to making your own photo frame with beautiful images and inspiring quotes. It pulls content from two Reddit channels -- images from /r/EarthPorn and quotes from /r/ShowerThoughts -- and mixes them together.

Rather than wait for the 24th century, why not bring the slick user interface found in Star Trek: The Next Generation to your Raspberry Pi today? While you won"t be able to drive a dilithium crystal powered warp drive with it, you can certainly control your smart home.

In the example above, Belkin WeMo switches and a Nest thermostat are manipulated via the Raspberry Pi, touchscreen display, and the InControlHA system with Wemo and Nest plugins. ST:TNG magic comes from an implementation of the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System (LCARS) seen in 1980s/1990s Star Trek. Coder Toby Kurien has developed an LCARS user interface for the Pi that has uses beyond home automation.

Building a carputer has long been the holy grail of technology DIYers, and the Raspberry Pi makes it far more achievable than ever before. But for the carputer to really take shape, it needs a display -- and what better than a touchscreen interface?

Setting up a Raspberry Pi carputer also requires a user interface, suitable power supply, as well as working connections to any additional hardware you employ. (This might include a mobile dongle and GPS for satnav, for instance.)

Now here is a unique use for the Pi and its touchscreen display. A compact, bench-based tool for controlling hardware on your bench (or kitchen or desk), this is a build with several purposes. It"s designed to help you get your home automation projects off the ground, but also includes support for a webcam to help you record your progress.

The idea here is simple. With just a Raspberry Pi, a webcam, and a touchscreen display -- plus a thermal printer -- you can build a versatile photo booth!

Projects along these lines can also benefit from better use of the touchscreen. Perhaps you could improve on this, and introduce some interesting photo effects that can be tweaked via the touchscreen prior to printing?

How about a smart mirror for your Raspberry Pi touchscreen display project? This is basically a mirror that not only shows your reflection, but also useful information. For instance, latest news and weather updates.

Naturally, a larger display would deliver the best results, but if you"re looking to get started with a smart mirror project, or develop your own from scratch, a Raspberry Pi combined with a touchscreen display is an excellent place to start.

Many existing projects are underway, and we took the time to compile six of them into a single list for your perusal. Use this as inspiration, a starting point, or just use someone else"s code to build your own information-serving smart mirror.

Want to pump some banging "toons" out of your Raspberry Pi? We"ve looked at some internet radio projects in the past, but adding in a touchscreen display changes things considerably. For a start, it"s a lot easier to find the station you want to listen to!

This example uses a much smaller Adafruit touchscreen display for the Raspberry Pi. You can get suitable results from any compatible touchscreen, however.

Alternatively, you might prefer the option to integrate your Raspberry Pi with your home audio setup. The build outlined below uses RuneAudio, a Bluetooth speaker, and your preferred audio HAT or shield.

Requiring the ProtoCentral HealthyPi HAT (a HAT is an expansion board for the Raspberry Pi) and the Windows-only Atmel software, this project results in a portable device to measure yours (or a patient"s) health.

With probes and electrodes attached, you"ll be able to observe and record thanks to visualization software on the Pi. Whether this is a system that can be adopted by the medical profession remains to be seen. We suspect it could turn out to be very useful in developing nations, or in the heart of infectious outbreaks.

We were impressed by this project over at Hackster.io, but note that there are many alternatives. Often these rely on compact LCD displays rather than the touchscreen solution.

Many home automation systems have been developed for, or ported to, the Raspberry Pi -- enough for their own list. Not all of these feature a touchscreen display, however.

One that does is the Makezine project below, that hooks up a Raspberry Pi running OpenHAB, an open source home automation system that can interface with hundreds of smart home products. Our own guide shows how you can use it to control some smart lighting. OpenHAB comes with several user interfaces. However, if they"re not your cup of tea, an LCARS UI theme is available.

Another great build, and the one we"re finishing on, is a Raspberry Pi-powered tablet computer. The idea is simple: place the Pi, the touchscreen display, and a rechargeable battery pack into a suitable case (more than likely 3D printed). You might opt to change the operating system; Raspbian Jessie with PIXEL (nor the previous desktop) isn"t really suitable as a touch-friendly interface. Happily, there are versions of Android available for the Raspberry Pi.

It’s not only the devices that have experienced rapid development. The development boards used for them have started to become more and more commercial and accessible.

For this demo, we will use the ClimaCell Weather API as a weather data provider, as they have a large number of indicators, including air quality indicators, for us to use.

As soon as we have this API key, we can move to the hardware configuration and connect the LCD screen to our Raspberry Pi. You should turn the Raspberry Pi off while you make the wire connection.

This hardware connection will make the LCD screen be on full brightness and full contrast. The brightness level is not a problem, but contrast is because we won’t be able to see the characters on the screen.

At this point, we can turn on our Raspberry Pi and we should see the LCD screen alive. With the help of variable resistance we should be able to control the contrast.

As a programming language, we’ll use NodeJS to write the code. If you don’t already have NodeJS installed on your Raspberry then you can follow these simple instructions.

In a new folder, run the command npm init -y to set up a new npm package, followed by the command npm install lcd node-fetch to install these 2 necessary dependencies.lcd will be used to communicate with the LCD Screen

We said that we need an API key to communicate with the weather data provider. You place your secret API key directly in the main code, or you can create a config.json file in which you can place this key and any other code-related configuration you may have.

Writing on the screen is a piece of cake using the lcd module. This library acts as a layer of abstraction over how we communicate with the device. In this way we don’t need to micro-manage each command individually.

The keys cols and rows represent the number of columns and rows of our LCD display. 16x2 is the one I used in this example. If your LCD has just 8 columns and 1 row, then replace 16 and 2 with your values.

At this point, you can use this function and print something on your display. writeToLcd(0,0,"Hello World") should print the message Hello World on the first row starting from the first column.

ClimaCell provides a lot of weather data information, but also air quality and pollen, fire and other information. The data is vast, but keep in mind that your LCD screen only has 16 columns and 2 rows – that’s just 32 characters.

To find your city’s coordinates, you can use a free tool like latlong.net and then you can save them in config.json file along with your API key, or you can write them directly in the code.

The weather data is updated every 5 minutes. But because we have a limit of 100 API Calls / Hour imposed by ClimaCell, we can go even further and update the weather data each minute.

The LCD setting is asynchronous, so we must use the method lcd.on() provided by the related library, so we know when the LCD has been initialized and is ready to be used.

Another best practice in embedded systems is to close and free the resources that you use. That’s why we use the SIGNINT event to close the LCD screen when the program is stopped. Other events like this one include:SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 - to catch "kill pid” like nodemon restart

At this point you’re probably connected to your Raspberry Pi using SSH or directly with an HDMI cable and a monitor. No matter what, when you close your terminal the program will stop.

From this point you can customize your new device however you want. If you find this weather data important for you (or any other data from ClimaCell, like air pollution, pollen, fire index or road risk), you can create a custom case to put the Raspberry Pi and the LCD display in it. Then after you added a battery you can place the device in your house.

Raspberry Pi is like a personal computer, so you can do much more on it than you would normally do on a microcontroller like Arduino. Because of this, it"s easy to combine it with other devices you have in your house.

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TheRaspad 3.0is a portable tablet enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 4B. It comes with a high resolution 1280 x 800 10.1 inch touch LCD screen, built in speakers, built in battery and a plastic enclosure that houses the LCD driver board and Raspberry Pi. Accessible on the side of the enclosure are the USB, HDMI, ethernet and audio ports which connect via the LCD driver board. They also include an accelerometer shim which allows the screen to autorotate.

A few months ago SunFounder, the company behind the RasPad 3.0 reached out to us and asked if we wanted to review the product with a free sample. Normally we don"t review products unrelated to SDR like this, but given the amount of RTL-SDR software available for the Raspberry Pi, and what appeared to be sufficient internal space, we were curious if there was a way to turn this into a portable RTL-SDR tablet...

A few weeks ago the Raspad 3.0 arrived, well packed and with all the advertised components. Note that the Raspad 3.0 does not come with a Raspberry Pi 4B, this is something you will need to provide on your own.

Inside was a mains power cable, 15V DC power brick, two HDMI jumpers, a USB jumper, accelerometer shim, SD card ribbon, small 5V fan, heatsinks for the Pi, screwdriver and mounting screws, a manual and the RasPad LCD screen itself.

Assembly is straight forward. You unscrew the enclosure using the provided screw driver, insert the Pi 4B, screw it down, connect all the cables from the Pi to the LCD driver board and SD card slot, then reassemble. After inserting the Raspberry Pi 4B and attaching all the cables this is what the inside looks like.

It turns out that the best way to fit in an RTL-SDR Blog V3 is to directly connect it to the spare USB port on the Pi. You might also consider using a micro style RTL-SDR which would fit more easily, but those do tend to get quite hot in a small package, and can be quite bad with internal noise. Also good shielding is probably quite critical in this application due to the dongles proximity with the LCD driver board which could be an RFI source.

The SMA side of the RTL-SDR Blog V3 rests nicely on top of the USB port of the LCD driver board providing some stability, and when the bottom lid is assembled there is plenty of clearance and no squashing.

Next we drilled a hole on the rear wall of the bottom half of the enclosure for the SMA female port, and tightened the SMA connector down with a nut. In the future we"ll be upgrading this to a long barrel style SMA female connector, as a regular SMA female connector is a bit short. Then a short well shielded SS405 coax cable was used to connect to the RTL-SDR dongle.

SunFounder provide a custom Raspbian distribution designed specially for the RasPad. However, we decided to instead install theDragonOS Pi64 Distrowhich is an Ubuntu distribution for the Raspberry Pi 4B that has many built in SDR programs. We burnt the image to a SD card, inserted it on the side, plugged the Raspad in to the power connector, and held the power button down for a few seconds to turn it on. Despite a few initial error messages saying it cannot enable the USB ports, everything eventually booted just fine.

We then plugged in a cable going to one of our multipurpose dipole antennas mounted just outside the office window, and tested both SDR++ and GQRX. In both cases we were immediately able to connect to the RTL-SDR and receive signals with signal strength equivalent to that received by our desktop PC, indicating that LCD interference was not a problem.

The resolution of the screen is high enough and images and text are clear. The screen is also decently bright, and brightness can be adjusted using the buttons on the side.

In DragonOS the touch screen works fine, although it is difficult to click on small buttons. There is no onscreen keyboard available by default. We couldn"t find a way to enable a tablet mode in DragonOS, so instead opted to install an onscreen keyboard called "onboard" via "sudo apt install onboard". The accelerometer is also not enabled in DragonOS. We did not attempt to fix this as we have no need for screen rotation.

LCD screens are well known to be sources of RF interference, and putting an SDR in close proximity to one could result in the spectrum being very noisy. However, without an antenna connected we did not notice any interference across the spectrum from the LCD screen. It appears that the LCD RFI noise levels are not too bad, and the shielding on the RTL-SDR Blog V3 and the coax jumper cable is good enough to prevent any being received. When an antenna with a few meters of coax was connected (such as a magwhip or our portable dipole) we also didn"t notice any LCD interference.

However, when a SMA telescopic antenna was connected directly to the SMA port we did start noticing the telltale spikes across the spectrum that are typically generated from LCD screens. If the magwhip or dipole was also moved within 2-3cm of the LCD screen, we also saw these interference spikes appear.

So it would be recommended to use a magwhip or dipole that has a coax run that can sit a few centimeters away from the screen. This limits the handheld ability of the RasPad a little, but you"d probably want a magwhip, dipole or other antenna over a directly connected telescopic whip for better reception anyway.

We tested a worst case scenario, with the RasPad running the RTL-SDR and SDR++ continuously at the brightest screen setting. With this test the battery lasted 2 hours and 10 minutes from a full charge. Presumably if the screen was dimmed and turned off for some periods of time, it would easily last 3-4 hours.

The small 5V fan provided in the kit is unfortunately a bit noisy, and it"s cooling ability is seems limited. We"ve seen these small fans on other Raspberry Pi cooling accessories and found that they are next to useless at cooling. It would be good to see a slightly larger and quieter fan, or perhaps a better passive cooling heatsink.

The RasPad 3.0 in our opinion overall a good product. It allows you to easily go portable with your Raspberry Pi 4. While it was designed for other projects, there was just enough hackability left in it for us to fit a RTL-SDR Blog V3 and antenna port into the enclosure, yielding us a clean and portable SDR solution.

With at least 2 hours of battery life when running an RTL-SDR and software, we can easily see this being taken out in the field for spectrum analysis, decoding with rtl_433, or for portable listening to the airband, trunking etc. However, some customization of DragonOS or the RaspadOS is going to be needed to get the most out of the touchscreen.

There are also alternative LCD screen products designed for the Raspberry Pi where you sit the Raspberry Pi on the back of the screen. But it"s unclear if there would be enough space inside to fit an RTL-SDR, and not to mention the lack of a battery. We alsopreviously reviewedthe Elecrow CrowPi which is somewhat similar, but a lot more clunky if you"re just after a pick up and go portable SDR tablet solution. There are also higher end higher priced laptop style enclosure products for the Pi, like the Pi-Top but we"re unsure if they"re likely to fit the RTL-SDR internally this easily.

7 inch mini HDMI monitor with HD 1024x600 resolution. This small LCD screen upgrades to IPS screen with larger visible angle and better image quality.

The USB capacitive touch control is for Windows and raspberry pi system, free-driver, just connect the 7” screen by the USB port of the computer/ Raspberry Pi.

Can be used as a general-purpose 7 inch HDMI screen connected to your TV box, game console, or mounted inside your PC case as temperature stat panel display, etc.

Connected to RPI 4: Connect to HDMI 0 port when working with Raspberry Pi 4.(Just power the screen by the USB port of the pi if you want to get the touch function available)

Connected to RPI 4:Connect to HDMI 0 port when working with Raspberry Pi 4.(Just power the screen by the USB port of the pi if you want to get the touch function available)

*When working with Raspberry Pi 4, for the system image of Raspberry Pi after 2021-10-30, for example onBullseye, please modify "dtoverlay = vc4-kms-v3d" to "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-v3d" in the config file, otherwise it may fail to start. But onBuster, please comment out "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-V3D" by adding #.

5 inch small HDMI monitor with 800x480 mini LCD screen. The touchscreen is USB capacitive touch control, free-driver, plug and play, micro USB interface for touch and power supply, HDMI interface for displaying. the maximum resolution it supports is 1920 x 1080.

When working with Raspberry Pi 4: please connect to HDMI 0 port, and comment out by adding # in the front of "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-V3D" or delete this line directly in the config.txt file.

When working with Raspberry Pi 4:please connect to HDMI 0 port, and comment out by adding # in the front of "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-V3D" or delete this line directly in the config.txt file.

*When working with Raspberry Pi 4, for the system image of Raspberry Pi after 2021-10-30, for example onBullseye, please modify "dtoverlay = vc4-kms-v3d" to "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-v3d" in the config file, otherwise it may fail to start. But onBuster, please comment out "dtoverlay = vc4-fkms-V3D" by adding #.

HyperPixel 2.1 Round has all the great features of our other HyperPixels - crisp, brilliant IPS display, touchscreen, and high-speed DPI interface—it"s just rounder! You can use it with any Raspberry Pi with a 40 pin header* but it works particularly nicely with the Pi Zero footprint - we"ve designed it so you can mount a Zero neatly behind it, so you can"t see the Pi when you look at it from the front.

This version of HyperPixel would be great for custom interfaces and control panels - mounted on a wall it would make a really neat, minimalist smart home controller or a stylish "what"s playing" display for your sound system. Everything is pre-soldered and ready to go, just pop it onto your Pi, install our software, and away you go!

* Please note that standoffs and booster headers are not included with Hyperpixel Round - scroll down or check out the extras tabs for some links. You will need a booster header if you want to use Hyperpixel Round with a full size Pi!

HyperPixel 2.1 Round uses a high-speed DPI interface, allowing it to shift 5x more pixel data than the usual SPI interface that these small Pi displays normally use. It has a 60 FPS frame rate and a resolution of approximately 229 pixels per inch (480x480px) on its 2.1" display. The display can show 18-bits of colour (262,144 colours).

The touchscreen variant is capacitive touch, that"s more sensitive and responsive to touch than a resistive touch display, and it"s capable of multi-touch!**

Hyperpixel Round will work with any 40-pin version of the Pi, including Pi Zero and Pi Zero W. If you"re using it with a full-size Pi then you"ll need a booster header to raise it up over the Pi"s USB ports and extended standoffs if you"d like to bolt it in place. If you"re using a Pi Zero or Pi Zero W you won"t need a booster header, but we have some special short standoffs that will let you attach everything securely together in an extra slim package.

If you"re using standoffs to fasten your Hyperpixel and your Pi together, just screw them into the posts on the underside of the HyperPixel PCB and then secure with screws through the mounting holes on your Pi.

Please note: when installing HyperPixel 2.1 Round onto your Pi make sure not to press down on the screen surface. We recommend putting the screen face down on a soft surface and gently wiggling the Pi to mate with the extended header (or GPIO header). If you need to remove your Hyperpixel, take care not to pull on the edges of the glass display - it"s best to hold on to the rectangular PCB. As the glass edges of this display overhang the PCB they"re quite exposed, so it"s worth being extra careful with them.

With this version of HyperPixel, we"ve separated the display drivers and touch drivers which should hopefully make it easier to incorporate touch interfaces into your own programs. To download and install the display drivers:

Note that you"ll need another display, keyboard, and mouse to install the software, or you could do it remotely over SSH if you set your Pi up headlessly.

HyperPixel uses basically all of the GPIO pins o communicate with the Pi (including the standard I2C pins) so it"s not generally possible to use it with other HATs and devices that connect via the GPIO...

...but we have provided an alternate I2C interface broken out on the back that will let you use I2C devices (like sensor breakouts) at the same time as HyperPixel. There are instructions how to set this up in our Hyperpixel 4.0 tutorial (scroll down to the bottom).

Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye includes major changes to how DPI display drivers work - a quick hack to get the screen working (with some loss of rotation/touch functionality) is to comment out dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d in boot/config.txt. We"re working on full support for Bullseye, but if you"re after an easy, fully featured Hyperpixel experience you should probably stick with Buster for now:

Raspberry Pi OS provides touchscreen drivers with support for ten-finger touch and an on-screen keyboard, giving you full functionality without the need to connect a keyboard or mouse.

The 800 x 480 display connects to Raspberry Pi via an adapter board that handles power and signal conversion. Only two connections to your Raspberry Pi are required: power from the GPIO port, and a ribbon cable that connects to the DSI port on all Raspberry Pi computers except for the Raspberry Pi Zero line.

This is a new Pi Pico display from Waveshare with many more pixels. It is a 2inch LCD display module, designed for Raspberry Pi Pico, with an embedded ST7789VW driver, 65K RGB colours, 320x240 pixels and an SPI interface. A Pi Pico can be plugged into the rear of the screen for very easy connection without any soldering. It sports 4 simple button switches for user input. It is bright, colourful and easy to program. The makers supply an example program (see below), which includes the display driver, making it very easy to get started. The manufacturer"s wiki can be found at: