Story 2015-09-29 NX79 The $60 Raspberry Pi touchscreen is now available

The $60 Raspberry Pi touchscreen is now available

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in hardware on (#NX79)
The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Tuesday launched the much-awaited display for its tiny, credit card sized computer. Pi display joins the family of accessories made by the foundation. The foundation has been working on the display for almost a year now. It's an RGB 800i-480 display @60fps with 24-bit color and 10 point capacitive touch capabilities. The display has mounting holes at the back so you can easily mount the Pi to it and use the whole thing as one unit. The good news is that it's using DSI (Display Serial Interface) for connectivity which leaves the only HDMI port on the Pi free for other use - such as connecting to a bigger monitor.

Users will have to use the latest OS on their Pi for the display to work flawlessly; if you are running Raspbian just run a system upgrade and connect the display. Since it's a touchscreen display, it can be cumbersome to use the native X Display server to interact with the device - using your finger, as a mouse is never that efficient. The foundation is suggesting Kivy, a Python GUI development system designed to work on touch based devices.
Reply 4 comments

Smartphone Sources (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-09-29 17:08 (#NY7J)

With all the smartphone screens these days, you would think they would be able to nab a much higher resolution screen (and likely cheaper) part from a phone maker's spare parts bin. With some new phones getting 4K screens today, something with only 480 vertical lines sounds a bit dated.

Re: Smartphone Sources (Score: 1)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2015-09-29 20:42 (#NYYH)

I agree the cost sounds really high, but really, for a rasberry pi, I think the resolution and size is ok.

Re: Smartphone Sources (Score: 4, Funny)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2015-09-30 01:49 (#NZKY)

You can easily almost double the vertical resolution.

Turn it 90°.

Re: Smartphone Sources (Score: 2, Insightful)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2015-10-01 14:15 (#P546)

You can still connect a higher res screen using HDMI. This one is using DSI port and keeps the HDMI port free for other uses.