Raspberry Pi 7” Touchscreen Display

Some of those Pizo units are just a speaker and you have to provide the tone, others are a complete buzzer and all you need to provide is a supply volts, the buzzer does the rest.

1) If you get with the plastic case, the USB slots on the case are a bit too small to allow many devices to be plugged in
2) any idea what the extra two wires are for?

Hi Vincent,

I just tried the power button mod.

It works fine.

Just to clarify, I am running Raspian Jessy on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, with the 7" touch screen LCD.

I can report that it also works (powers down the pi) during the gdm login screen prior to user login.

As you can see in the picture, I added the wires to 5 (blue - gpio) and 9 (black - gnd).

Harder to see, the LCD uses 2 (red - +5V) and 6 (black - gnd) as in the instructions.

I have not got around to the power LED modification.

The Black White and Green wires were an attempt to wire in some piezo elements as speakers - this was not successful, I don't get any sound out of the speakers. More debugging to do!

Regards - Paul

So true!  I design and build lasers for a living and I have a saying that "Customers are idiots."  I've written many a manual for said lasers and I don't assume anything when I describe an operational procedure.  For those familiar with the lasers, my descriptions are boring to put it mildly, but for those who RTFM, their questions will be answered.  I've also been on the customer service side of things so know users can come up with some pretty far fetched questions.  Even a rudimentary manual is better than nothing!  Case in point - the little booklet that came with my Canakit Pi was in essence a dozen screenshots of "do this" then "do this next".  But still, for someone dealing with something new it was helpful!

Hi Scott.

You hit the nail on the head!

I deleted the rest of what I was going to say - it was just too ranty.

Lets just say that the really simple problems that crop up with the Raspberry Pi are very very very hard to solve by reading forums. Forums are not a solution to vendors failing to provide real information. In most cases good documentation would avoid the endless searching that is likely to stop new comers making a success of their projects.

Paul

*soapbox mode: on*  I agree with this 150%!  I left a scathing review on Amazon for this very reason.  I get the feeling the people who develop these types of things have an elitist attitude that if you can't spend four hours searching a hundred different forum posts on a dozen different forums for the topic of interest, then screw you.  Well sorry to disappoint, but my time is more valuable than that.  I'm not saying you shouldn't have to do a little bit of research, but the basics like how to power the device should be provided.  I can wallpaper my room with the "safety" sheet that was provided in every language, past and present, known to man, so why not include a little slip with a drawing showing what those four jumpers are for and where they should be connected.  It that such a difficult task? *soapbox mode: off*

I like to be able to "have" documentation rather than refer to web sites that might not be available in the future (no internet connection, etc.).

You may too, if so, the following will be of interest:

I found a link to a technical drawing of the display on the RS website:

http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/150e/0900766b8150e1df.pdf

Also the assembly instruction pictures (almost identical to the above):

http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/1446/0900766b81446707.pdf

Paul

PS does anyone know how to view the posts here - most recent first?

Hi Vincent,

I just followed the link you gave. Thanks -  I think I will be giving both the button and the LED mods a go.

You will need to chose another ground pin from the gpio header - both the display board and the button mod suggest you use pin 6. I suggest changing the button ground pin to 9 (e.g. use 5 and 9).

The LED mod also wanted pin 6, I suggest using 14 for the ground with the gpio on 8.

Other than too many connectors to go on the ground pins, I can't see why it will not work.

Have fun - Paul

Very nice update.

It always pays to read the fine print when doing something new.

DAB

Hello everybody.

I have spent most of BoxingDay trying to setup my "Official Rasberry Pi 7" capacitive touch screen" .

I feel really sorry for anyone that bought an un-official one ;-)

I am using a Raspberry Pi 3, running Raspbian Jessie.

You can find this out by opening a command window and typing: cat /etc/os-release

I actually attached the screen before running the update and upgrade commands, and was pleased to find that both the display and touch screen just worked out of the box.

It would have been nice to have a manual or even a printed sheet showing the connections - especially those that you can't see once the boards are screwed together. "Search online" for the instructions is not what I expected to have to do. I guess they have been busy for the last 3 years.

Next I ran the update and upgrade just to be sure:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get clean

Then came the part that took all the time to sort out. I hope my notes below will help you have a less frustrating Christmas holiday.

I tried matchbox-keyboard, it does not work. There is no entry added to the menu. If it is run from the command line by typing matchbox-keyboard, with or without the "&" after the command, the CPU goes to 25% (e.g. one core flat out) and the file manager stops working. Shutdown and reboot also take ages to complete.

You would think someone might have sorted this out after three years - why is it still in the instructions on element14?

I spent ages reading post after post that either said it just works fine or there is another page that has a fix. I even tried to go through most of the 379 posts on this page, but got bored of going in circles.

To uninstall matchbox-keyboard enter: sudo apt-get remove matchbox-keyboard

Next I tried florence. I was a little hesitant because there are lots of reports of issues with that too. However it worked for me in the end as part of the final solution.

To install: sudo apt-get install florence

Then: sudo apt-get install at-spi2-core

The second part fixes a problem with the keyboard disappearing when a key is pressed.

I did a reboot to flush everything through.

At the login page there was no virtual keyboard, so I still needed a physical keyboard to log in.

The florence keyboard is now found in menu->Universal Access->Florence Virtual Keyboard

It appears "always on top", it can be enlarged using the magnify buttons on the left, you can add arrow keys or number pad by clicking the spanner on the left and selecting them under the "layout" menu. (I chose to get rid of the "floating icon" under the spanner->"window"  menu.)

Once running, the keyboard can be hidden and restored using the icon in the task bar.

Next I spent a long time reading endless pages on how to get a login keyboard. I ended up installing gdm3 "Gnome Desktop Manager".

To install: sudo apt-get install gdm3

Part way through the install, a config page appears that asks which manager you wish to use. The current one is "lightdm", you need to use the arrow keys to select "gdm".

Having completed the install, I rebooted and I now get a new look login page with a simple virtual keyboard at the bottom.

The next question, was what have I broken by doing all this?

I previously had installed/configured Mono, realvnc and SSH. I use vnc and ssh to remote in from a Windows 10 PC and do file transfers.

The shell and remote desktop both worked fine after log in, WinSCP also worked. A simple .Net test program I wrote that has some GUI buttons worked fine running under mono (I could press the buttons using the touch screen).

I then rebooted and tested vnc and ssh before I logged in. This also worked.

Note that with the remote desktop (vnc) both my laptop and the raspberry pi screen showed the same display - mouse movements and all.

That's it.

I have a working display, with touch screen. I have a virtual keyboard called up by menu. I have a different one for login. I can ssh, remote desktop and run .Net all as before.

Now its time to eat the left over turkey.

Happy Holidays - Paul

EDIT:

Four more things (this list grew from two to three to four while I was typing this),

1/ The next day I found I can't remotely connect to the Pi using vnc unless I have recently successfully ping'd between the PC and Pi. So relying on it for the login screen is dangerous. Not sure if this is a Pi issue or my Wifi router.

2/ DO NOT press the "ALT" keys on the Florence virtual keyboard. If you do, you are likely to need to pull out the power cord on the Pi (without shutting it down nicely). I suspect that having pressed ALT, all further presses are as though the ALT key is pressed and this stops you releasing it.

Also be careful with the "CTRL" keys as these also latch.

3/ If you buy a touchscreen case/stand, the display is likely to be mounted upside down. The original design had it the wrong way up for best viewing angle, so they changed it in the OS to give the best readability. <joke>Unfortunately no-one told the people making the cases to change their OS settings to match <end joke>.

To fix this you need to add a new line "lcd_rotate=2" (without quotes) to the file: "/boot/config.txt".

The file is protected so you need to use the sudo command. Open a command window, (little black icon near the Pi button ">_" ), change to the "/boot" directory by typing "cd /boot", then run nano "sudo nano config.txt".

Add a new line (without the quotes) "lcd_rotate=2"

CTRL-X to quit nano, and accept filename and changes.

4/ Don't allow the Pi to go to sleep (screen saver) at the gdm login screen. If you do, you can't wake it up using the touch screen. Having previously got vnc to connect I was able to wake the display remotely using the PC.

I can't think of any excuses for problems like 2 and 4. Simple stuff like this should just work.