This little display is pretty impressive. Touch functions work great. You can drive your RPi 4 with the little stylus that is included in the kit. I had no issues installing the hardware or adding the drivers using the instructions on the Amazon product page for this little case/display combo. I'll be honest, unless you have a specific project in mind for this, like making a wee-television for LEGO people, or using it for a control box with touch screen for something else I'm not sure what real applications this would fill that you could not do with other devices like tablets. Having said that... it's incredibly fun and the fact that the display supports rotation at the HARDWARE level (meaning mounted physically upside down) you can see the power-on/boot messages correctly is VERY impressive. As you can see from my photo, I have power connected at the top and the display is oriented properly. Simply use the rotate.sh command in the /home/pi/LCD-show directory and it reboots with the orientation you choose and remembers it. Very cool attention to detail in my opinion. This function is specific to this display where you'd normally use a rotate command in your /boot/config.txt file, but doing that does NOT get you rotated text when booting up from power-off. In any event, this seems like a neat little device. The RPi runs pretty warm with this screen, even with the fan and heat sinks, so I'd probably say over-clocking your RPi 4 might not be the best idea. Update: 05/07/2020 - After reading some other reviews, I thought I'd also mention that the screen resolution is not ideal in certain applications. I had some issues with things like browsers getting clipped off-screen and had to do a little additional work to move the window so I could get at certain buttons for certain windows. I'm sure there are ways around that, but for a casual user it might be frustrating. Aside from that.. it's still humming along. Read more
Took me a bit of tweaking (still need to adjust the screen) but got it working. Not for the faint of heart but does function. I then paired it with a battery. It preforms like a low quality smartphone. Read more
The media could not be loaded. Keep in mind that this is a 3.5" screen that runs at a resolution of 320x480 pixels. You will not be able to see your entire desktop... applications will be cut off. If you remote desktop via VNC viewer, your window will mimic the 320x480 resolution when you connect. This means that any limitations on the physical screen will carry over to VNC viewer. You will need to switch back to HDMI to do anything that requires full desktop access. Also, when using the stylus the point of contact on the screen did not correspond with mouse movements for me. I still have not figured out how to fix that... but I am not using it as a touch screen and it's not a priority for my project. The enclosure does not appear to provide adequate cooling (even with the fan and heatsinks). I am only running a simple crypto coin ticker and the Pi is between 57 and 60 Celsius in an air conditioned environment at 22.22 Celsius. This is a handy little screen if you know its limitations; it works for me because I purpose built it to be a crypto/stock ticker. This screen may work well as a clock or some kind of home monitoring system if you can sort out the stylus to screen coordinates. Read more
Yes that is in all caps. This product is very poorly made, in every possible way. I see all the other positive reviews, and it baffles me that people think this is a quality product. First of all, MAKE A BACKUP before you load the drivers. Read the listing carefully, the seller has indicated that this display driver is known to cause a total crash of your OS. Like, brick it, instantly. Their suggested fix? Reload it and try again. Well, I did that 3 times, and it bricked it every time. Suffice it to say I am returning this product for a refund. And before anyone says there is something wrong with my build, I have the same build running on the RPi “official” 7” touchscreen and it is running great. I am looking to make the whole thing smaller now. Second, the screen “hat” has no substantial support connections. It is held only by the connecting pins. It sits on top of the usb ports, and they give you a Small plastic spacer to put on top of the Ethernet port (which is not discussed in the instruction sheet). It wiggles and moves every time you tap it. Third, the heat sink for the cpu is a flat piece, with no fins for cooling. This is because the (noisy) fan is so close to the board that there’s no room to put one of the typical finned heat sinks. I found the processor tends to be much hotter than it should be, and there was hot air being pushed out of the usb and Ethernet ports, suggesting that airflow has zero thought in it. They probably only added the fan because it’s just barely enough to keep the thing from burning up. Very poor design. Fourth, the case is 2 pieces, and does not securely clip together. The side with the power and hdmi ports is loose. All things considered, this is a low-quality thing with bad driver code and little to no substantial support. Very disappointing but I guess not surprising in today’s unmoderated marketplace. Read more
