sudomod

Hi All,

After showing my partners Dad the MintyPi build he was amazed at the size of the screen and wanted something of a similar size to be used in his taxi to show passengers info like;

Drivers Name
No Smoking
Cash Only
etc.

Would it be possible to use one of Helders screens (I ordered an identical one from China for testing,) and wire it up directly to the PIs GPIO pins bypassing Helder's LCD board and ribbon cable and house it in an enclosure.

Would I also need to use a certain Linux Distro for it to display out via the GPIO or should any Distro do ?

Thanks

If you use a Pi, you must stick to raspbian distro.
As for the screen, it communicates via SPI with the Pi. As space won’t be a real issue for your father, i highly suggest you to go instead for an HDMI screen that will be just plug and play while SPI needs wiring, coding...

Edit before i get pitchforked lol : for the distro, i highly recommend raspbian as you will find a lot of support for it and as it is widely supported by the maker’s community. Any other distro can suit but you could struggle

If you only need a few images then you might be able to get away with an Arduino. They can talk directly to the screen, and if you use something like a pro mini, it will be smaller than a pi.

Thanks for the input, not used an Arduino before so it would be a good excuse to start.

Cheers

Adafruit has a reasonably priced TFT shield that fits on top of an Arduino.

Even if you don't buy their product, Adafruit usually publishes schematics, software libraries, tutorials and build logs. You can often get the components cheaper elsewhere and bodge up your own version.