This really should be the next thing the RPi team tackles, IMO. It's nice we have this great cheap computer, but trying to find a screen to plug into it is terrible. A computer monitor or TV is fine, but both of them draw too much power and are far too big and stationary. And have you seen the prices of small HDMI screens? I can buy a 8" Windows tablet, full PC mind you, for the price of a single 5" HDMI screen.<p>Far too often I find myself saying "it shouldn't be this hard". Surely there exists a market for an adapter to plug an easily available iPhone screen into an RPi?
This looks extremely fun, and I can see it being used for creating homemade mobile devices, and stand-alone packaged hardware.<p>I will say fun and small size notwithstanding the current cost of doing this ($50) is a little high relative to just buying a super-low end LCD monitor ($85 for an 18" by Samsung, Asus, and Acer, $54 for a refurb from NewEgg). But I'm sure that misses most of the point...<p>Just seems like the $30 for the 5" LCD is a little steep but maybe you're paying a premium because it is so small(?).
For about the same price ($60) you can get this fancy little HDMI display <a href="http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260" rel="nofollow">http://www.adafruit.com/products/2260</a> For $20 more it comes with a touch screen. It is great for little BBB or RPi projects, zero config required for the BBB.
Wow, didn't know that you could do this with the Pi. People have been doing this with the Cubieboard since it came out[1], but to be honest I'd always assumed the Raspberry Pi display outputs were as tightly locked down behind the binary GPU blob as the CSI camera connector.<p>[1] See for instance <a href="http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS" rel="nofollow">http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard/LVDS</a> - I believe it supports DPI as well as LVDS. script.fex is basically Allwinner's equivalent of the device tree.
This has been an issue for me for awhile. I've been scouting for screens for awhile for something cheap. I've been visiting GoodWill often as they have a large selection of monitors to choose from but most of them are far too large for a small screen. $15 is a great deal for a cheap monitor, but it takes up a huge amount of room.
How many old laptops are thrown away ? They have nice LCD, and for 50$ I'd be tempted to snip a LCD controller on ebay. Less educational, more eco-friendly.
The pi-s have a display interface connector for DSI panels, and they are planning to bring one out, but it seems to be taking a long time. The intent is that it will be very inexpensive, in line with their education focus. The resolution I saw mentioned was 800 x 480, like the one in this article. A bit small, but usable.
This is an awesome post. A number of older laptop screens use this "standard" and you can just take off the screen and repurpose it. The trick is that sometimes the flex cable between the screen and the laptop has extra stuff on it.<p>Time to go panel hunting for some more panels :-)
I'm aware that this is not comparable to a 800x480 display but if you just want to output some simple monochrome graphics the 1.6" Nokia 3310/5110 Displays are quite nice. Very easy to drive and really dirt cheap - they can be found for about $3!
as an aside, the game on the screen is Gunstar Heroes which is an incredible side-scroller that everyone should play at least once:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes</a>
I can get a whole Android tablet for $60 with higher resolution. Why cant I buy just the screen for $25?<p>Basically take the tablet manufacturing process and remove most of the stuff thats not a screen and add HDMI.
It's truly amazing how someone can now put together a brand new computer for less than $100 with a bit of effort. I have the Raspberry Pi 2 and it's quite impressive, especially when running on an ARMv7-compatible Linux build.
Maybe they can tackle the long-lived, widely-experienced SD card corruption issues of the RPi in the next version instead of adding a bunch more pins and an extra core.<p>Meanwhile the competition even has eMMC in the same price range.