And not any old display, but a touchscreen display.
Here’s what you need to do build a touchscreen computer using a Raspberry Pi.
First, you need a Raspberry Pi. That’s easier said than done given that they’re in short supply, but shop around and you’ll probably find one (here’s ZDNET’s advice on where to buy the Raspberry Pi 4 and alternatives).
If you have an older Raspberry Pi 3 lying about, you can use that with this display.
Also: These are my 3 must-have Raspberry Pi accessories
Here’s mine – it’s an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 B.
Then you need a display.
There are a number of displays out there, but the one that I’m using here is the official Raspberry Pi 7-inch 800 x 480-pixel touchscreen.
That, plus a Phillips-head screwdriver, is the minimum you need, but I’ve gone a bit further here and added a case as well.
The case helps protect the Raspberry Pi and the display from damage, and makes it feel like a proper computer as opposed to a homebrew project.
Now that you have all the parts you need, here’s the process for adding the touchscreen display to your Raspberry Pi.
How to add a touchscreen to a Raspberry Pi
To attach the ribbon cable to the connector on the display, first find the display connector. There’s a little gray plastic tab on this connector that has to be slid back to allow the ribbon cable to be fitted. Push the ribbon cable as far as it will go and then press the gray tab back into place to secure the ribbon cable. Also: I just solved one of my biggest Raspberry Pi headaches The ribbon cable in my kit had a blue side, and the instructions said to have this side facing toward the circuit board. Your ribbon cable might be different, so check your instructions. Make sure not to overtighten these screws. For reference, here are the four connections on the display board, along with which pin on the Raspberry Pi they need to be connected to:
5V –> Pin 2 or Pin 4GND –> Pin 6SDA (data) –> Pin 3SCL (clock) –> Pin 5
How do you know which pin is which on the Raspberry Pi? Looking at the Raspberry Pi board with the writing in the correct orientation, with the 40-pin connector at the top (called a GPIO, which stands for general-purpose input/output), pin 1 is on the bottom left, and pin 40 is top right. Now’s a good time to connect the other end to the Raspberry Pi. The process is the same as for connecting it to the display controller. I found it took a bit of fiddling to get the display into the case properly, but everything seemed to fall into place once the screws were fitted. (Again, you do not need to overtighten these screws.)
