HANDS ON A $40, 5-inch touchscreen has landed for the Raspberry Pi, offering a smaller sibling for the existing 7-inch model.
The display is a multi-touch capacitive panel, which supports five-finger input. The active area is 2.4 x 4.3 inches (62 x 110 mm) with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, and the viewing angle is 80 degrees (slightly down from the 7-inch version, which has an 85-degree viewing angle). The unit itself measures 3.6 x 5.6 inches (91 x 143 mm).
The 7-inch incarnation has an active area of 3.4 x 6.1 inches (87 x 156 mm), and measures 4.7 x 7.4 inches (120 x 189 mm) in total. Both units have a backlight brightness of 500 cd/m² and a typical touch response time of 35 ms.
Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2
We were given a sample to play with, and the initial impressions are good. Attaching a Pi to the back of the screen is simple, and everything from screws to ribbon cables is provided. Power comes from the Pi’s GPIO pins, and an illustration shows where to plug in the connectors. The standoffs on the back support the full-size Pi; users hoping to plug in a Pi Zero or Pi 3A will be disappointed.
If you’re expecting something like an enclosure or stand, you’re out of luck. In its $40 guise, the Touch Display 2 is strictly a component, although there are plenty of cases out there if needed.
The other slight annoyance is the touch support out of the box. The Raspberry Pi OS has touch support and will pop up a keyboard when needed, but gestures or swipes don’t work on first boot, which can be jarring for users expecting a smartphone or tablet-type experience.
The Raspberry Pi team told us that gesture support isn’t handled in the operating system (“at least, not in a standard Linux operating system”). Rather, “it’s done in the UI toolkit (GTK, for example) or in the application itself (Chromium, for example).”
The screen also doesn’t detect its orientation. A jump into the Screen Configuration tool in Raspberry Pi OS is required to change from landscape to portrait mode.
However, expecting the OS to respond to a swipe by default or to auto-detect the orientation would miss the point of the screen. This unit is for projects that need a touch display. Perhaps an industrial control panel or an intelligent display in a museum, or whatever weird and wonderful project needs an inexpensive, high-resolution touchscreen.
The other annoyances are to do with the hardware. While powering the device from the GPIO is useful, it could also present problems for users requiring a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top). It’s also a shame that the option to power the screen from a source like USB isn’t included. The power consumption of the screen depends on the screen brightness level, but the Raspberry Pi team told us it was “typically around 1.5 W.”
The bezel around the screen might also be a little chunky for some. It was a deliberate choice, according to the Raspberry Pi team. “We wanted it to be as easy as possible for makers to build the display into personal projects.”
“People can take a box of some kind, cut a hole that’s accurate to ±10 mm, and fix the Touch Display + Raspberry Pi into it, perhaps even just by gluing.”
It’s easy to imagine the device being embedded in a wall or part of a display.
There are any number of touchscreens available, but the Raspberry Pi units represent a rapid and easy way to get going without worrying about drivers, compatibility, and calibration. We were up and running with ours in minutes. Yes, there are a few annoyances, but nothing that we’d describe as a showstopper.
If you’ve got a project that would benefit from fingers jabbing at a screen, then the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 is definitely worth a closer look. ®