raspberry lcd touch screen driver free sample

【Plug and Play】 No driver needed. You don’t need to install any driver and just connect the HDMI port and Micro USB port from display to your device. The backlight can be turned off to lower power consumption.

【Five-points Touch】Capacitive touch control and Five-points Touch. It has vertical and horizontal image flip function. Equipping with HDMI & Earphone Jack & 2x Micro USB port support. Connect the screen to other devices via the HDMI interface and power it via Micro USB.

【Strong System Compatible】Support Windows operating systems, Mac OS and other systems. When works with Raspberry Pi, supports Raspbian/Ubuntu MATE/Lubuntu/Snappy Ubuntu Core/Kali/OSMC/Retropie/WIN10 IOT, driver free; When to work as a computer monitor, supports Windows XP/10/8/7 and Mac OS.

【Widely Application】This touch display can be used for security monitors and other multi-purpose displays, network player boxes, raspberry pi, HD DVR, high-end instruments, extended laptop monitors.

In these videos, the SPI (GPIO) bus is referred to being the bottleneck. SPI based displays update over a serial data bus, transmitting one bit per clock cycle on the bus. A 320x240x16bpp display hence requires a SPI bus clock rate of 73.728MHz to achieve a full 60fps refresh frequency. Not many SPI LCD controllers can communicate this fast in practice, but are constrained to e.g. a 16-50MHz SPI bus clock speed, capping the maximum update rate significantly. Can we do anything about this?

The fbcp-ili9341 project started out as a display driver for the Adafruit 2.8" 320x240 TFT w/ Touch screen for Raspberry Pi display that utilizes the ILI9341 controller. On that display, fbcp-ili9341 can achieve a 60fps update rate, depending on the content that is being displayed. Check out these videos for examples of the driver in action:

Given that the SPI bus can be so constrained on bandwidth, how come fbcp-ili9341 seems to be able to update at up to 60fps? The way this is achieved is by what could be called adaptive display stream updates. Instead of uploading each pixel at each display refresh cycle, only the actually changed pixels on screen are submitted to the display. This is doable because the ILI9341 controller, as many other popular controllers, have communication interface functions that allow specifying partial screen updates, down to subrectangles or even individual pixel levels. This allows beating the bandwidth limit: for example in Quake, even though it is a fast pacing game, on average only about 46% of all pixels on screen change each rendered frame. Some parts, such as the UI stay practically constant across multiple frames.

Good old interlacing is added into the mix: if the amount of pixels that needs updating is detected to be too much that the SPI bus cannot handle it, the driver adaptively resorts to doing an interlaced update, uploading even and odd scanlines at subsequent frames. Once the number of pending pixels to write returns to manageable amounts, progressive updating is resumed. This effectively doubles the maximum display update rate. (If you do not like the visual appearance that interlacing causes, it is easy to disable this by uncommenting the line #define NO_INTERLACING in file config.h)

This driver does not utilize the notro/fbtft framebuffer driver, so that needs to be disabled if active. That is, if your /boot/config.txt file has lines that look something like dtoverlay=pitft28r, ..., dtoverlay=waveshare32b, ... or dtoverlay=flexfb, ..., those should be removed.

This program neither utilizes the default SPI driver, so a line such as dtparam=spi=on in /boot/config.txt should also be removed so that it will not cause conflicts.

Likewise, if you have any touch controller related dtoverlays active, such as dtoverlay=ads7846,... or anything that has a penirq= directive, those should be removed as well to avoid conflicts. It would be possible to add touch support to fbcp-ili9341 if someone wants to take a stab at it.

If you have been running existing fbcp driver, make sure to remove that e.g. via a sudo pkill fbcp first (while running in SSH prompt or connected to a HDMI display), these two cannot run at the same time. If /etc/rc.local or /etc/init.d contains an entry to start up fbcp at boot, that directive should be deleted.

-DPIRATE_AUDIO_ST7789_HAT=ON: If specified, targets a Pirate Audio 240x240, 1.3inch IPS LCD display HAT for Raspberry Pi with ST7789 display controller

-DKEDEI_V63_MPI3501=ON: If specified, targets a KeDei 3.5 inch SPI TFTLCD 480*320 16bit/18bit version 6.3 2018/4/9 display with MPI3501 display controller.

-DBACKLIGHT_CONTROL=ON: If set, enables fbcp-ili9341 to control the display backlight in the given backlight pin. The display will go to sleep after a period of inactivity on the screen. If not, backlight is not touched.

-DSTATISTICS=number: Specifies the level of overlay statistics to show on screen. 0: disabled, 1: enabled, 2: enabled, and show frame rate interval graph as well. Default value is 1 (enabled).

Here is a full example of what to type to build and run, if you have the Adafruit 2.8" 320x240 TFT w/ Touch screen for Raspberry Pi with ILI9341 controller:

If the user name of your Raspberry Pi installation is something else than the default pi, change the directory accordingly to point to the user"s home directory. (Use pwd to find out the current directory in terminal)

These lines hint native applications about the default display mode, and let them render to the native resolution of the TFT display. This can however prevent the use of the HDMI connector, if the HDMI connected display does not support such a small resolution. As a compromise, if both HDMI and SPI displays want to be used at the same time, some other compatible resolution such as 640x480 can be used. See Raspberry Pi HDMI documentation for the available options to do this.

The refresh speed of the display is dictated by the clock speed of the SPI bus that the display is connected to. Due to the way the BCM2835 chip on Raspberry Pi works, there does not exist a simple speed=xxx Mhz option that could be set to define the bus speed. Instead, the SPI bus speed is derived from two separate parameters: the core frequency of the BCM2835 SoC in general (core_freq in /boot/config.txt), and the SPI peripheral CDIV (Clock DIVider) setting. Together, the resulting SPI bus speed is then calculated with the formula SPI_speed=core_freq/CDIV.

Ensure turbo speed. This is critical for good frame rates. On the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, the BCM2835 core runs by default at 400MHz (resulting in 400/CDIV MHz SPI speed) if there is enough power provided to the Pi, and if the CPU temperature does not exceed thermal limits. If the CPU is idle, or voltage is low, the BCM2835 core will instead revert to non-turbo 250MHz state, resulting in 250/CDIV MHz SPI speed. This effect of turbo speed on performance is significant, since 400MHz vs non-turbo 250MHz comes out to +60% of more bandwidth. Getting 60fps in Quake, Sonic or Tyrian often requires this turbo frequency, but e.g. NES and C64 emulated games can often reach 60fps even with the stock 250MHz. If for some reason under-voltage protection is kicking in even when enough power should be fed, you can force-enable turbo when low voltage is present by setting the value avoid_warnings=2 in the file /boot/config.txt.

On the other hand, it is desirable to control how much CPU time fbcp-ili9341 is allowed to use. The default build settings are tuned to maximize the display refresh rate at the expense of power consumption on Pi 3B. On Pi Zero, the opposite is done, i.e. by default the driver optimizes for battery saving instead of maximal display update speed. The following options can be controlled to balance between these two:

The main option to control CPU usage vs performance aspect is the option #define ALL_TASKS_SHOULD_DMA in config.h. Enabling this option will greatly reduce CPU usage. If this option is disabled, SPI bus utilization is maximized but CPU usage can be up to 80%-120%. When this option is enabled, CPU usage is generally up to around 15%-30%. Maximal CPU usage occurs when watching a video, or playing a fast moving game. If nothing is changing on the screen, CPU consumption of the driver should go down very close to 0-5%. By default #define ALL_TASKS_SHOULD_DMA is enabled for Pi Zero, but disabled for Pi 3B.

The CMake option -DUSE_DMA_TRANSFERS=ON should always be enabled for good low CPU usage. If DMA transfers are disabled, the driver will run in Polled SPI mode, which generally utilizes a full dedicated single core of CPU time. If DMA transfers are causing issues, try adjusting the DMA send and receive channels to use for SPI communication with -DDMA_TX_CHANNEL= and -DDMA_RX_CHANNEL= CMake options.

Enabling #define USE_GPU_VSYNC reduces CPU consumption, but because of raspberrypi/userland#440 can cause stuttering. Disabling #defined USE_GPU_VSYNC produces less stuttering, but because of raspberrypi/userland#440, increases CPU power consumption.

The option #define SELF_SYNCHRONIZE_TO_GPU_VSYNC_PRODUCED_NEW_FRAMES can be used in conjunction with #define USE_GPU_VSYNC to try to find a middle ground between raspberrypi/userland#440 issues - moderate to little stuttering while not trying to consume too much CPU. Try experimenting with enabling or disabling this setting.

If your SPI display bus is able to run really fast in comparison to the size of the display and the amount of content changing on the screen, you can try enabling #define UPDATE_FRAMES_IN_SINGLE_RECTANGULAR_DIFF option in config.h to reduce CPU usage at the expense of increasing the number of bytes sent over the bus. This has been observed to have a big effect on Pi Zero, so is worth checking out especially there.

The option #define RUN_WITH_REALTIME_THREAD_PRIORITY can be enabled to make the driver run at realtime process priority. This can lock up the system however, but still made available for advanced experimentation.

A pleasing aspect of fbcp-ili9341 is that it introduces very little latency overhead: on a 119Hz refreshing ILI9341 display, fbcp-ili9341 gets pixels as response from GPIO input to screen in well less than 16.66 msecs time. I only have a 120fps recording camera, so can"t easily measure delays shorter than that, but rough statistical estimate of slow motion video footage suggests this delay could be as low as 2-3 msecs, dominated by the ~8.4msecs panel refresh rate of the ILI9341.

The codebase captures screen framebuffers by snapshotting via the VideoCore vc_dispmanx_snapshot() API, and the obtained pixels are then routed on to the SPI-based display. This kind of polling is performed, since there does not exist an event-based mechanism to get new frames from the GPU as they are produced. The result is inefficient and can easily cause stuttering, since different applications produce frames at different paces. Ideally the code would ask the VideoCore API to receive finished frames in callback notifications immediately after they are rendered, but this kind of functionality does not exist in the current GPU driver stack. In the absence of such event delivery mechanism, the code has to resort to polling snapshots of the display framebuffer using carefully timed heuristics to balance between keeping latency and stuttering low, while not causing excessive power consumption. These heuristics keep continuously guessing the update rate of the animation on screen, and they have been tuned to ensure that CPU usage goes down to 0% when there is no detected activity on screen, but it is certainly not perfect. This GPU limitation is discussed at raspberrypi/userland#440. If you"d like to see fbcp-ili9341 operation reduce latency, stuttering and power consumption, please throw a (kind!) comment or a thumbs up emoji in that bug thread to share that you care about this, and perhaps Raspberry Pi engineers might pick the improvement up on the development roadmap. If this issue is resolved, all of the #define USE_GPU_VSYNC, #define SAVE_BATTERY_BY_PREDICTING_FRAME_ARRIVAL_TIMES and #define SELF_SYNCHRONIZE_TO_GPU_VSYNC_PRODUCED_NEW_FRAMES hacks from the previous section could be deleted from the driver, hopefully leading to a best of all worlds scenario without drawbacks.

Currently if one resizes the video frame size at runtime, this causes DispmanX API to go sideways. See raspberrypi/userland#461 for more information. Best workaround is to set the desired screen resolution in /boot/config.txt and configure all applications to never change that at runtime.

The speed of the SPI bus is linked to the BCM2835 core frequency. This frequency is at 250MHz by default (on e.g. Pi Zero, 3B and 3B+), and under CPU load, the core turbos up to 400MHz. This turboing directly scales up the SPI bus speed by 400/250=+60% as well. Therefore when choosing the SPI CDIV value to use, one has to pick one that works for both idle and turbo clock speeds. Conversely, the BCM core reverts to non-turbo speed when there is only light CPU load active, and this slows down the display, so if an application is graphically intensive but light on CPU, the SPI display bus does not get a chance to run at maximum speeds. A way to work around this is to force the BCM core to always stay in its turbo state with force_turbo=1 option in /boot/config.txt, but this has an unfortunate effect of causing the ARM CPU to always run in turbo speed as well, consuming excessive amounts of power. At the time of writing, there does not yet exist a good solution to have both power saving and good performance. This limitation is being discussed in more detail at raspberrypi/firmware#992.

At the moment fbcp-ili9341 is only likely to work on 32-bit OSes, on Raspbian/Ubuntu/Debian family of distributions, where Broadcom and DispmanX libraries are available. 64-bit operating systems do not currently work (see issue #43). It should be possible to port the driver to 64-bit and other OSes, though the amount of work has not been explored.

By default fbcp-ili9341 builds with a statistics overlay enabled. See the video fbcp-ili9341 ported to ILI9486 WaveShare 3.5" (B) SpotPear 320x480 SPI display to find details on what each field means. Build with CMake option -DSTATISTICS=0 to disable displaying the statistics. You can also try building with CMake option -DSTATISTICS=2 to show a more detailed frame delivery timings histogram view, see screenshot and video above.

The fbcp part in the name means framebuffer copy; specifically for the ILI9341 controller. fbcp-ili9341 is not actually a framebuffer copying driver, it does not create a secondary framebuffer that it would copy bytes across to from the primary framebuffer. It is also no longer a driver only for the ILI9341 controller. A more appropriate name might be userland-raspi-spi-display-driver or something like that, but the original name stuck.

Yes, it does, although not quite as well as on Pi 3B. If you"d like it to run better on a Pi Zero, leave a thumbs up at raspberrypi/userland#440 - hard problems are difficult to justify prioritizing unless it is known that many people care about them.

If fbcp-ili9341 does not support your display controller, you will have to write support for it. fbcp-ili9341 does not have a "generic SPI TFT driver routine" that might work across multiple devices, but needs specific code for each. If you have the spec sheet available, you can ask for advice, but please do not request to add support to a display controller "blind", that is not possible.

No. Those are completely different technologies altogether. It should be possible to port the driver algorithm to work on I2C however, if someone is interested.

At the moment one cannot utilize the XPT2046/ADS7846 touch controllers while running fbcp-ili9341, so touch is mutually incompatible with this driver. In order for fbcp-ili9341 to function, you will need to remove all dtoverlays in /boot/config.txt related to touch.

Yes, fbcp-ili9341 shows the output of the HDMI display on the SPI screen, and both can be attached at the same time. A HDMI display does not have to be connected however, although fbcp-ili9341 operation will still be affected by whatever HDMI display mode is configured. Check out tvservice -s on the command line to check what the current DispmanX HDMI output mode is.

At the moment fbcp-ili9341 has been developed to only display the contents of the main DispmanX GPU framebuffer over to the SPI display. That is, the SPI display will show the same picture as the HDMI output does. There is no technical restriction that requires this though, so if you know C/C++ well, it should be a manageable project to turn fbcp-ili9341 to operate as an offscreen display library to show a completely separate (non-GPU-accelerated) image than what the main HDMI display outputs. For example you could have two different outputs, e.g. a HUD overlay, a dashboard for network statistics, weather, temps, etc. showing on the SPI while having the main Raspberry Pi desktop on the HDMI.

double check that the display controller is really what you expected. Trying to drive with the display with wrong initialization code usually results in the display not reacting, and the screen stays white,

This suggests that the power line or the backlight line might not be properly connected. Or if the backlight connects to a GPIO pin on the Pi (and not a voltage pin), then it may be that the pin is not in correct state for the backlight to turn on. Most of the LCD TFT displays I have immediately light up their backlight when they receive power. The Tontec one has a backlight GPIO pin that boots up high but must be pulled low to activate the backlight. OLED displays on the other hand seem to stay all black even after they do get power, while waiting for their initialization to be performed, so for OLEDs it may be normal for nothing to show up on the screen immediately after boot.

fbcp-ili9341 runs a clear screen command at low speed as first thing after init, so if that goes through, it is a good sign. Try increasing -DSPI_BUS_CLOCK_DIVISOR= CMake option to a higher number to see if the display driving rate was too fast. Or try disabling DMA with -DUSE_DMA_TRANSFERS=OFF to see if this might be a DMA conflict.

This suggests same as above, increase SPI bus divisor or troubleshoot disabling DMA. If DMA is detected to be the culprit, try changing up the DMA channels. Double check that /boot/config.txt does not have any dtoverlays regarding other SPI display drivers or touch screen controllers, and that it does NOT have a dtparam=spi=on line in it - fbcp-ili9341 does not use the Linux kernel SPI driver.

Double check the Data/Command (D/C) GPIO pin physically, and in CMake command line. Whenever fbcp-ili9341 refers to pin numbers, they are always specified in BCM pin numbers. Try setting a higher -DSPI_BUS_CLOCK_DIVISOR= value to CMake. Make sure no other fbcp programs or SPI drivers or dtoverlays are enabled.

As the number of supported displays, Raspberry Pi device models, Raspbian/Retropie/Lakka OS versions, accompanied C++ compiler versions and fbcp-ili9341 build options have grown in number, there is a combinatorial explosion of all possible build modes that one can put the codebase through, so it is not easy to keep every possible combo tested all the time. Something may have regressed or gotten outdated. Stay calm, and report a bug.

The Frame Rate column shows the worst case frame rate when full screen updates are being performed. This occurs for example when watching fullscreen video (that is not a flat colored cartoon). Because fbcp-ili9341 only sends over the pixels that have changed, displays such as HX8357D and ILI9486 can still be used to play many games at 60fps. Retro games work especially well.

The Tontec MZ61581 controller based 320x480 3.5" display on the other hand can be driven insanely fast at up to 140MHz! These seem to be quite hard to come by though and they are expensive. Tontec seems to have gone out of business and for example the domain itontec.com from which the supplied instructions sheet asks to download original drivers from is no longer registered. I was able to find one from eBay for testing.

If you would like to help push Raspberry Pi SPI display support further, there are always more things to do in the project. Here is a list of ideas and TODOs for recognized work items to contribute, roughly rated in order of increasing difficulty.

Vote up issue raspberrypi/userland/#440 if you would like to see Raspberry Pi Foundation improve CPU performance and reduce latency of the Pi when used with SPI displays.

Vote up issue raspberrypi/firmware/#992 if you would like to see Raspberry Pi SPI bus to have high throughput even when the Pi CPU is not under heavy CPU load (better SPI throughput with lower power consumption), a performance feature only SDHOST on the Pi currently enjoys.

This driver is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt. In nonlegal terms, it"s yours for both free and commercial projects, DIY packages, kickstarters, Etsys and Ebays, and you don"t owe back a dime. Feel free to apply and derive as you wish.

and connect the other end of the USB cable to the USB port of the LCD; then supply power to Raspberry Pi; after that if the display and touch both are OK,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It appears that the upgrade package overwrites the FBTFT drivers, in particular, the Raspberry Pi bootloader. This seems to solve the problem:

Unfortunately, their “driver” is an SD card image containing a complete installation of Raspbian which has been preconfigured to use their display. Which is fine if you’re setting up a brand new system that doesn’t need to be a specific distro, but if you’re trying to add the display to an existing Raspberry Pi, already configured the way you want it, with software installed and data present, or if you want to use a specific distro such as Octopi, then it’s not terribly helpful.

Hello..I tired to interface this lcd “https://www.crazypi.com/raspberry-pi-products/Raspberry-Pi-Accessories/32-TOUCH-DISPLAY-RASPBERRY-PI” to my Raspberry pi model B+.I got a DVD containing image for LCD in the package.I burned it to the SD card and plugged in the display.But my lcd is completly blank.But green inidcation led (ACT LED) in board is blinking.Why my LCD is Blank ?

If you have tried using the manufacturers image and the screen doesn’t work, it could be that the screen has a hardware malfunction. If the process above doesn’t work either, I would contact the manufacturer

Is your RED (POWER) LED on? I had the same problem. Green Led was blinking and screen was white. Then I noticed RED Led is off, indicating there’s something wrong with the power. I plugged into different port and it started

Yes, it may be that the screen isn’t supported. Newer screens might not have drivers yet. I do know it is possible to make your own driver but that’s above my level of knowledge :)

My Touchscreen is now working fine.The problem was for the ribbon cable on the back side of LCD.It was not connected properly.I just tighted the cable and it worked fine.Hope it will be useful tip.

Thank you for this great tutorial. I looked everywhere for this information. I have an eleduino 3.5 version A. I was able to get it working on my Pi 2 by following your tutorial and using flexfb as the screen type. I got the other settings from the image that came with the product. I did find that the ts_calibrate didn’t recognize the screen so I installed xinput-calibrator and it worked fine.

Just got my Pi2 running Wheezy, working with the Eleduino 3.5 LCD without running the OEMs image… kinda. I didn’t want to rebuild the application environment again, so was avoiding flashing the SD.

I tried the steps in this tutorial. It’s very clear and easy to follow, thank you. But it didn’t work for me, I tried setting my device to flexfb. Only got white screen.

thank you for your great tutorial, it got me on the right way. unfortunataly i only see some boot messages on the lcd and then it turns black. maybe you could give me a hint on how to get it working entirely.

Did you check to see if your device is supported yet? The device name should be specific for your screen, as listed in the fbtft file linked to in the beginning of the post

I too have a raspberry pi 2, and a waveshare spotpear 3.2 RPi lcd (v3) and I just can’t get it to work! I suspect I have a faulty LCD, but thought I’ll try this forum for help before I sent it back.

Soon as the pi is powered, the LCD lights up all white, with a few vertical pixels coloured at one of the edges, and nothing else. I don’t think that should happen – not at least before the BOIS has started up.

It seems all appears to be working – just the LCD is still all white with a single line of coloured pixels on edge) and nothing else. Is there a way to output, like jeff G script, of touch points?

I had the same one, I finally found a driver for it here: http://www.waveshare.net/wiki/3.2inch_RPi_LCD_(B) you will need to translate the page, but unpack the driver then run sudo ./LCD-show/LCD32-show. It should reboot and all will be good with the screen :)

Can anyone let me know if the default OS image sent with the screen works with pi2 or just Pi B/B+ as i think my screen maybe broken but can’t confirm it yet as i have not had it working at all

My system: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with Raspian Wheezy from Febuary 2015. LCD display of Sainsmart 3.2 http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/1283498/Raspberry-Pi-Display-Modul-Touch-Display-81-cm-32/?ref=home&rt=home&rb=1

The LCD display shows the raspberry correctly. However, the touch screen input does not work. The mouse pointer can I move correctly with your finger, but I can not select things (function of the left mouse button).

Thank you so much for this great tutorial. I have my WaveShare SpotPear 3.2″ V4 working fine on my Raspberry Pi 2. If you are having problems with this specific hardware, skip step 5.

Can someone upload SD card image that works with RBP2 ? My idea is to use Eleduino TFT as additional screen and play movies via HDMI.. is it possible?

Do not follow this article when you don’t know what kind of LCD module. In my case, I follow all of this and my raspberry pi cannot boot anymore. I will try to recover, but I think I should format my SD card and reinstall OS.

Expecting this would builtin driver module within kernel and help with avoiding mistakenly overwriting anything. But with this is cause LCD screen to go blank white and no boot activity. Also noticed on HDMI it get stuck on Initial rainbow screen and stuck on that.

Does anyone tried splash boot screen with waveshare v4 LCD and Rpi2? I tried to follow some example from https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki/Bootsplash but no success.

Great tutorial thanks; got an X session working great 1st time. Has anybody managed to get Kodi/XMBC working on the LCD either Kodi standalone, Raspbmc or Xbian?

After following this tut to the letter on a brand new image of Raspian, I find that the touch driver does not function. Anyone experience the same? Basically all I did was image a current copy of rasping, did a apt-get upgrade, and then did this tutorial. Then the touch driver does not work, meaning the pointer does not respond.

The reason I did this was because on a production version of my system I added the 3.2 screen and it worked great except for the x-axis. So I wanted to see if there was something in my system that was interfering or if this is another error. Now with a raw rasping the driver does not work at all. I wonder if the touch pin has changed since the kernel is using BCM pins instead of GPIO pin numbers?

I have exactly the same problem. I also installed a new version of Raspbian, and the LCD part works fine (except all the windows are way too large), but the touch part doesn’t work at all… I’m using Waveshare Spotpear 3.2″ V4.

I remember that I plugged in the screen wrongly one time, before configuring any of the GPIO pins. Can this have damaged the screen? Still it’s weird that the display part works well and the touch part not at all.

Touch actually goes through one of the SPI pins I think. Either the driver is toast with the required kernel update or the driver is using the wrong pin. It is very likely the this works well with previous raspian versions, but not with the new B+ and with the new kernel.

I am trying to use the sainsmart 2.8″ lcd sold through microcenter, using the sainsmart32_spi … seems to have the same pinouts, should I be able to get this to work? I am stuck at the white out screen on the lcd, doesn’t seem to recognize the module either.

The SainSmart 3.2 sold by MicroCenter (20-111-971) is actually the exact same WaveShare SpotPear v3 documented here. So maybe your 2.8 would work if you tried a WaveShare driver?

Unfortunately I’ve tried that ( a few times actually) but the file still doesn’t exist. Thanks very much for the assistance anyway. I must be doing something wrong. My Raspian came from a Noobs installation, I’m wondering if I should try installing the OS from somewhere else. My LCD screen didn’t come with a CD or any docs so I’m completely in the dark here.

I have just found a way to get this file on my system! Apparently its part of the fbturbo installation. I found it here http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=45746&start=75 (under experimental enhanced x driver (rpifb).. Sorry if this is obvious to everyone but I am SUCH a noob at this!!

I have the waveshare 3.5 and what to use it only as a secondary screen by putting measurement data with a c program on the screen. Is there any solution?

Ok, what am I doing wrong. I am using a fresh install of the newest raspbian, on a Pi 2. After doing the first two steps and rebooting I get the rainbow screen, then the boot up process, and then my screen just goes black with a flashing cursor in the top left. I am not able to enter any commands or anything…like the pi is halting just after boot up. Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Well figured out that step 1 was causing my problems. I’m guessing it is shutting off my hdmi feed and trying to switch it over to the SPI, am I guessing right? If so, not sure how I’m suppose to complete the rest of the steps if my hdmi output gets turned off before the LCD is actually set up to work…that sounds kind of smartass-like, which is not my intention, just looking for some clarification on what is going on in that first step as I am fairly new to this stuff. Thanks.

Anyway, I was able to do the rest of the steps with no problem. LCD didn’t work, but I am using a Waveshare 3.5, which doesn’t look to be supported yet. Mostly I am trying to play around and see if I can get it working somehow. Anyone found a way to do this yet?

Here is a link to an updated image from waveshare. Upon install it got the display up and running, but I still do not have touch functionality. I’ve been playing around with it, but it has been to no avail…hopefully someone better at this stuff from me can get the touch working.

I am having an issue with getting the GUI back. Every time I use startx my pi just sits there for about two minutes saying “No protocol specified”, and then it just gives up. I went through this tutorial about four times now and am not certain why it is doing this. I have the exact same LCD as is in the tutotial (WaveShare 3.2b). any help would be great.

Hi I am making a project for school,using the raspberry pi b+ and waveshare spotpare 3.2b. Everything works except the touch input doesn’t work. Any help would be appreciated very much.

Thanks for the tutorial. It works, but I get the boot/command line stuff on the HDMI monitor and the LCD only comes on when I do startx. Is there a way to get everything to appear on the LCD screen?

I am trying to get this same screen to work with the image of RetroPie 2.6 and it won’t work. I have followed all the steps and nothing, please help I an kinda a noob.

I have a Tontec 7 inch touchscreen with a Raspberry Pi 2 B. After following the instructions the touch screen is functioning but not properly… The only are that works is the upper left (and only a small area of that). I tried changing the width and height in the modules but it didnt change anything. Also the xy seems to be reversed, I changed the swap_xy to 1 but again no change on the screen.

Now the OS freezes at the emulation station loading screen, and if I connect my lcd it gives me a lot of error messages which I can only see on the 3.2 inch screen.

hi i have the same screen with a raspberry pi 2 im trying to run retro pie but it wont show ..however it shows all the commands …but i cant get it to show the gui …if u guys can make an image or something please i have been in this pain for two weeks already thank you

Damn.. I thought I was kickin ass haha. I am using the SainSmart 3.2″.. the backlight is lit up and the pi was booting and everything just fine but on the final reboot it gets hung and says “nonblocking pool is initialized” ?? No idea what that means. But it’s def just frozen at this point.. on my main screen, and just the backlight is on the SainSmart.

This was an excellent tutorial. I have gotten an output to the screen, but no touchscreen usage . I have the Waveshare SpotPear 3.2 Inch LCD V4 screen, but using Raspberry PI 2 with wheezy. Any ideas?

Thanks a lot for this article. Very clear and easy . I am new in pi’s world and my 3.2″ screen is working fine. I rotate 90 º and works. I can use mouse and so on.Not problems.

I filed the steps to calibrate the screen but it did not work.I think because it did not find the TFT pin, because I think the touch problem is the assigned pin to control it changed.

I actually used the driver from here http://www.waveshare.com/wiki/3.2inch_RPi_LCD_(B) , from a new wheezy build, did nothing except enable SPI in config, install driver, and change mmcblk0p2 to mmcblk0p6 in cmdline.txt and it all worked, no drama.

Hi I managed to set up my touch screen ok but I now have the issue that everything desktop fits fine but the windows I open are all huge and I can’t remember how to change the size and cannot see the option in desktop preferences any idea what I have to do and is it at all possible to install kodi to run through the raspbian is as this would be a lot my useful than having to keep swapping os on every boot up many thanks in advanced hope you can help me

Advice to all who have the drivers from the (touch)screen manufacturer and cannot obtain those otherwise: you can skip everything and go to the update steps skipping the kernel and kernel modules update (as mentioned by the author) so that you don’t override the preinstalled drivers. I have a Waveshare 3.5″ RPi v3 (not the 3.2″ supported by notro’s drivers) and actually managed without any problems to get notro’s drivers make it work. However I am still reading about the xinput and xinput-calibrator to figure out how to include it as a kernel module so that I can compile my own kernel and add it there.

i have raspberry pi 2 with 3.2 inch rpi lcd v4 waveshare spotpear.i have done as per your instructions.the display is working but touch screen not working.error shows waveshare32b module not found as well as touch screen module not found messages.

Hey! i did this and rotated it… It loads console perfectly, but when it goes into startx, i get a black background with only the wastebin/trashcan… how do i get the taskbar(or whatever that bar is called)? and the raspberry background?

Unfortunately I have lost the Touch facility on my Waveshare 3.5″ LCD Touchscreen? Can you offer any reasons as to why? I copied the Raspbian image to my Raspberry Pi from the Waveshare website first of all. The Touchscreen displays but is not reactive with any touch

I have purchased a raspberry pi B+ total kit and waveshare 3.2 TFT display online. In the package i have been given a pre-loaded NOOBS installed SD card. I did not even start anything yet. What should i do what r the things needed and how to connect the display i really want to know. I need help as i don’t know anything. Does the above solution help or will u suggest something………………..

Hi great article thanks. I am trying to get a waveshare 7 inch LCD with capacitive touch running it works with the suppled image but if you upgrade it breaks the capacitive touch. I have a sense-hat and GPS which require the latest kernel and RASPIAN image and the install program for the screen replaces the /lib/modules directory and the kernel with older ones. I need to be able to install the touch drivers into a new clean OS can anyone give me some pointers? Thanks

I should add that the screen is plugged into the HDMI port and always works. The capacitive touch is driven from the USB port which also supplies power.

For anyone who have those unbranded cheap TFT touch modules and cannot get it to work with this guide, I had success on my 3.5″ with the following steps: http://pastebin.com/89qmFbPB

I have the WaveShare 3.5 (A) and cannot get it to work with the Kali Linux with TFT for Raspberry Pi. Have anybody gotten the A to work? (Not the B, theres instructions for the B already and dont work with A)

So I have the original image that came with my screen and it works fine with the LCD but my problem is that I want to use my LCD screen with other distros (at this time I am trying to use it with Kali Linux with TFT support by default https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-vmware-arm-image-download/) What do I have to do to transfer the needed files from the original image that WORKS with the screen and use them with another image?

I originally bought this bundle http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013E0IJUK?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00 with an RPi LCD V3 and no extra documentation on the specifics on the chipset. I tried with the bftft drivers but since I have no idea what to call this screen I just suppose it isn’t supported.

After 4 lost days I just decided to get another screen, a Waveshare 3.2 (just like the one on this tutorial), I’ll follow these steps and see if it work for me.

I’ve followed your instructions and am only getting a white screen stil. I am using the Osoyoo 3.5 inch touchscreen from Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013E0IJVE?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00

I’m not sure if the Jessie kernel is compatible – can anyone please confirm or not ?? Adafruit states that their setup for TFT screens are Wheezy only ; is this a different setup ??

I am using the same LCD and followed your tutorial. Have your tested the guide lately? Are you certain that it works? I see the boot messages on console but I get white screen as GUI starts.

After I rebooted in step 3, my raspberry pi won’t boot up again. It goes thru the process of booting and the text scrolls down and every thing says “ok”. Then instead of going to GUI it just guys to a black screen on my monitor with a blinking underscore in the top left corner. Anyway to get around this? or should I start over with a fresh disk image??

I have tried to set up waveshare 32b on my Pi B using the latest Raspian download. I learned a lot in the process using Windows Putty, Nano etc. I have repeated the setup process several times from scratch and included the corrections for possible overwriting. My Waveshare SpotPear 3.2 inch RPi LCD V4 just shows a white screen. Any suggestions?

I’d suggest that you use the included installation disk to make a clean install on another SD card to see if the screen itself works fine or not, then try to repeat the process of installation after upgrading

There was no disk included. I asked for drivers and was given a download link to the image file. After down loading this I tried it and still got just a white screen. The HDMI monitor locks partway though the boot. I can still log in to pi using putty from my PC.

This process worked for me except for two things. The screen only shows 25* of any page so the most important buttons are inaccessible, and now the Wifi does not work and cannot be activated where it worked fine before the reboot. Any suggestions?

Hi, I am using raspberry pi 2 with raspbian jessie installed. I the waveshare spotpear 3.2 v4. The above instructions are not working. and after completing the steps there was no display from hdmi or lcd. One things to notify is.: the etc/modules files only had i2c-dev and not snd-bcm2835.

I am trying to get this to work with Retro Pie 3.3.1 and the Waveshare3.2″ v4 but I only get the terminal on the lcd and emulation station starts on hdmi. to get it working with retro pie i just replaced startx with emulationstation. how do i get this to work?

Sir, Your post has very useful to me. i am using Tinylcd. but i cant get display. i am performing all the steps in your post. i cant get touch controller information from the product website and also i am using RASPberryPi B+ model. could u please give me best solution to my work. Than you.

Hi, what if you dont know the make of your screen, i purchased via Ebay, and it is unbranded, the contact speaks barely any English and keeps linking me to a custom kernal download.

what if OS is not Raspbian, any other distro like Yocto project, etc.? Could you please specify process without “rpi-update” that makes driver installation process more generic, not dedicated to Raspbian.

i installed android OS in raspberry pi 2. can i use same LCD touch screen set up for android installed raspberry pi 2 which you are used for raspbian.

Is it normal the white back light during the whole process of initializing (I suspect that during the transportation trere is a deffect)? The problem is that I missed the step #1 and I performed it at the end. Unfortunately I don’t have any monitor available right now – neither “normal”, neither LCD :))))). Is it possible turning back the system or the only option is reinstallation of the Raspbian?

I’m trying to use an original Raspberry Pi model B with a cheap 3.5 inch 320×480 LCD which allegedly was manufactured to work with the Pi and has the correct fittings to fit over the GPIO pins. The operating system is the latest, downloaded yesterday and installed with NOOBS. I can’t get past step 2 of this guidance. When I reboot after using raspi-config I can see text generated as the Pi boots, then the HDMI fed screen goes blank apart from a flashing cursor in the top left hand corner. The LCD just remains white with nothing else on it. I have missed out step 1 and rebooted after step 2 and the screen functions as I would expect. Does anyone have any ideas please?

Thanks for the great tutorial. I do have a question. Once you install the drivers for the lcd are you effectively disabiling the hdmi port or is it still available to use and will the pi function with both displays. I have a pi 3

once you install the drivers it replaces the kernel by disabling hdmi output and enables it for LCD. i don’t think we have a solution to get em both working at the same time. ( you are encouraged to search for it )

Thanks for the guide, have been doing this with my son but once we leave raspi config and reboot all we get is a black screen with a flashing white horizontal line (dash). Can you help? I have looked in the comments at the end of the article but no one else appears to have this issue.

I have a raspberry pi 2 with waveshare screenn 3.5 inches. Isn’t it the same instructions. But it isnt working, all i get is a white screen, and the red led on the pi is on. The green LED isnot working.

My Rpi3 gets “ERROR: could not insert ‘spi_bcm2708’: No such device” after I enable SPI in the raspi-config.My Rpi3 is freezing on the rainbow screen after I reboot at the end of step 3. I’ve tried adding boot_delay=1 to config.txt.

if any interested, now i have a raspian image working on raspberry 3 with Waveshare 3.5, also with sdr support for dongles and FreqShow working perfectly on touch

I tried following your tutorial but I got stuck right at the first step… I enter sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf the whole screen is blank except for the command list at the bottom…

I’d like to find the driver software for my 7″ LCD with touch (official Pi unit) so that I can use it in buildroot. I wanted to make sure this kernel is the one before I started digging further.

Every time I reboot after step 3 I get the rainbow screen of death (lost the kernel) and have to reimage my card and start over. Anybody had this happen and have a solution?

I started through your tutorial and completed step 3 and rebooted. After the Raspberry screen and some of the boot text on my HDMI monitor, I now have a black HDMI monitor and a white screen on my LCD. Does this mean that the bootloader was overwritten or something else is wrong? How am I supposed to enter in the proposed fixes to the bootloader, when I can’t get the RPi to boot? Do I have to interrupt the boot process at some point to reinstall the bootloader or what?

Its a script. Download and instead of running sudo ./LCD4-show run cat ./LCD4-show to simply display what it does without actually running it. The commands are fairly simple modifying a few files. I actually saved the LCD-show.tar.gz on my own server for faster future download but also for backup as it saved me tons of hours (if that’s a measuring unit for time :) )

I used this link though (smaller file ~ 50 KB, fast download) http://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/4/4b/LCD-show-161112.tar.gz and replaced LCD4-show with LCD32-show in the last line.

I’m using RasPi Zero with latest (as of last week) Jessie Raspbian. Did you run the script? If it didn’t work and you have modified other files in the process of making it work, I would recommend installing a fresh installed image on a new card and running the script. Can you suspect the screen being faulty or got “burned” in the process?

i bought a 3.5 inch tft lcd screen from banggood. and i have installed raspian jessie, the latest version, in my sd card. but when i power on my Pi, only a white backlit screen comes. there are no images or graphics whatsoever.

Of course. Raspbian Jessie does not come with the drivers needed to talk to the screen. See my previous comment (September 22, 2016 at 11:54 am) and follow it.

The owner of this article should including a WARNING in the header that if someone follows the steps, they will install a deprecated driver (which is only visible as tiny text on its gethub page here https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware). This driver after install will break Raspberry Pi and the SD card will need to be reimaged, for some less experienced users, this could also mean lost work if they failed to backup their code or resources. On windows, it requires installing Linux reader software and it takes a long time to fix this f**kup which could easily have been avoided if the author had and sense of responsibility.

I have done every thing right but the only major problem is that the screen is still white and my raspberrypi freezes after a line of code when booting up and I cant get in with SSH

Will your system work with my SainSmart 2.8″ 2.8 inch TFT LCD 240×320 Arduino DUE MEGA2560 R3 Raspberry Pi ? I would like to know before not be able to back out. Thanks, Lee

I know I will end up regretting this, but how do I change fb0 to fb1? I’m on the screen that has all the info, but no way to change it. Am I looking for a file? I have had my screen for MONTHS and I can’t do anything with my pi or the screen. I am >< close to smashing both. COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY so far!!

hello. I really appreciate your blog post. I have a raspberry pi 3 B. I have been unable to get my waveshare 3.2 screen to work.I am at a complete loss for what to do. I do step 2 I change fb0 to fb1 and then follow your directions I don’t get the prompt to reboot; however, I do it manually with sudo reboot. that works fine then I complete step three and that works just fine; however once I reboot from getting those drivers and when I attempt to reboot it is unsuccessful and then my whole raspberry pi will not restart. then when I power it back on it will just shut back off. I then have to redo noobs onto a new SD card I would GREATLY appreciate anyones help

I ‘m actually using a LCD Waveshare3.2” , I followed your steps to setup the lcd touchscreen for my rpi and it work but I have a problem with the resolution because if I open a repertory I do not see the whole contents on the screen .

hi! thank you for this post…. I was wondering if all the raspberry pi’s gpio are being held by this screen or do we have any of those availables for use??

it worked. but the resolution is for bigger screens. i got the menubar small, but the rest appears too big , and out of screen. the wastebasket icon is 1/6 of my 3.2″ screen. wich HAS the resolution capability too display the whole desktop. But i’m a PI newby and dunno how to adjust the screen resolution on this display. anybody?

hey Thanks for this good post …I have capacitive touchscreen which i brought from the link below..can you guide how i can configure the kernel modules…It will be very helpful for me…Thanks

hey Thanks for this good post …I have capacitive touchscreen which i brought from the link below..can you guide how i can configure the kernel modules…It will be very helpful for me…Thanks

I did a 5inch LCD for my raspberry pi. I dont use the touchscreen so i didnt have to install any drivers. It works out of the box but doesnt cover the whole screen unless you open the terminal and do:

HI I have my RPI running Pi Presents on a view sonic TD2230 Touchscreen. It all works fine, touching the click areas can navigate you thru my presentation, The problem arises when you use multitouch gestures like you would on a iPhone. Pinch or expand etc… and then all touch ability goes away. I can still control the presentation via a mouse, but I don’t get touch control back until I either relaunch Pi Presents, or if I unplug and plug the usb cable going to the touchscreen.

Could you provide me with a os image of open elec that you already built for the waveshare spotpear v4 3.2 inch touchscreen,because I cannot make sense of your website’s instructions?

Much of this is outdated on Raspbian Stretch where device tree overlays (see https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/device-tree.md) provide for most of the configuration automatically.

In the case of the WaveShare driver, their setup script from their “LCD_show” repository will copy a device-tree overlay to /boot/overlays/ that provides most of the module config etc via boot-time device-tree patch.

After I did the step that “INSTALL THE FBTFT DRIVERS” and then reboot, my raspberry pi couldn’t boot successfully and the green light is always on, could you help me solve this problem? Thank you.

Compatible and Direct-connect with any revision of Raspberry Pi. (If you are using a Raspberry Pi Zero / Zero 2 W, an additional HDMI cable is required).

Raspberry Pi leads out 40 GPIO pins, while the screen leads out 26 pins. When connecting, pay attention to the corresponding pins and Raspberry Pi pins.

5) Insert the TF card into the Raspberry Pi, power on the Raspberry Pi, and wait for more than 10 seconds to display normally. But the touch is abnormal at that time, and the touch needs to be calibrated as the following steps.

3. After reboot, touch will work normally under normal circumstances. But for different resistance screens, the accuracy of using the default calibration parameters may not be very suitable.

You can perform touch calibration by clicking the Raspberry Pi icon on the taskbar, selecting Preferences -> Calibrate Touchscreen, and following the displayed prompts.

4. After calibration, the following data will be displayed. If you want to save these touch values, you can replace the data in the red circle with the data in the corresponding position in 99-calibration.conf.

Since the ads7846.dtbo provided by Raspberry Pi by default has no de-jitter parameters, you can increase the de-jitter parameters by modifying and replacing ads7846.dtbo

The installation of xserver-xorg-input-evdev and xinput-calibrator in Ubuntu system reports an error, so the touch cannot be used normally. How to solve it?

The installation of xserver-xorg-input-evdev and xinput-calibrator in Kali system reports an error, so the touch cannot be used normally. How to solve it?

7) Connect the HDMI interface of the LCD to the HDMI port of Raspberry Pi and then power on the Raspberry Pi, it can display normally after waiting for about a few seconds.

The screen is displayed vertically by default. For convenience, you can adjust the display orientation of the screen, see #Rotation(Working with Raspberry Pi).

After the display is rotated, the position of touch is incorrect because the touch doesn’t change with the display angle. So the touch also needs to be modified.

In some special systems, when you cannot rotate by modifying the software, you can press and hold the "Rotate Touch" button for 5 seconds to rotate touch. And you may need to test multi times for the correct orientation.

We recommend using the software modification method. Otherwise, when using the new system, it may cause touch reverse errors. At that time, you need to press and hold "Rotate Touch" to rotate.

Note: If you increase the brightness, it may cause the insufficient power of the LCD by getting power through the USB interface. To solve this problem, you can input 5V/2A power through the Power interface on the back of the LCD.

Since the first-generation Raspberry Pi released, Waveshare has been working on designing, developing, and producing various fantastic touch LCDs for the Pi. Unfortunately, there are quite a few pirated/knock-off products in the market. They"re usually some poor copies of our early hardware revisions, and comes with none support service.

There is a easy way to setup resolution of your screen by a shell script, you can download the scripts by git tool and use it to change resolution for your screens as following steps:

If the touch function does not work properly, or no respond, please try another MicroUSB cable which supports data transfer, you can also connect extra power cable.

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.

Plug and play, as easy as plugging micro USB cable for touch and power supply, HDMI cable for displaying, both cables included in the package, no driver needed.

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.

Supports PC with HDMI port:Used as a small second monitor for laptop which has Win7, Win8, Win10 system, 5 point touch (XP and older version system: single-point touch), free drive.

Supports PC with HDMI port:Used as a small second monitor for laptop which has Win7, Win8, Win10 system, 5 point touch (XP and older version system: single-point touch), free drive.

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 #.

ER-TFTV070A1-3 is 800x480 dots 7" color tft lcd module display with small HDMI signal driver board and superior display quality,super wide view angle. It"s optional for optional 4-wire resistive touch panel with USB driver board and cable, optional capacitive touch panel with USB controller board and cable, optional remote control,It can be used in any embedded systems,car,industrial device,security and hand-held equipment which requires display in high quality and colorful video.It"s also ideal for Raspberry PI by HDMI.

7 lcd touch screen for raspberry pi : support operation with gloves, water , and thick tempered glass or PC on top of the cover glass, mainly used in medical, industrial, security, home appliances and other fields; Custom processing such as surface treatment --AG,AR,AF available, resolution and brightness optional, etc

Viewing Angle:70/70/50/70Support Systems:Windows/Android/Linux etc.Light Transmittance:≥85%Surface Hardness:≥6HInterface Type:I2CController IC:CypressTouch Points:1-10 Points

A:We have more than 10 years experience in touch screen industry. From material purchasing to product delivery, we have own professional staff and procedures to prevent potential quality risk. Our products have been approved by ROHS.

A: The capacitive screen solution includes: Cypress , Goodix, Focal tech, ATMEL, EETI, ILI, etc. The cover lens, sensor and FPC of the touch can be customized in depth according to the actual needs of customers;

The display solution includes: the current mainstream display glass panel, and we can customize the brightness of the display screen, FPC shape, interface definition, driver IC solution according to the actual needs of customers, etc

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.

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.

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 fo