Thursday, November 20, 2014

new Raspberry PI Monitor

I bought one of these - what sold me was the price, the 800x600 resolution  and the 7"size.
I had a Dangerous Prototypes ATX breakout board hooked up to an old power supply, thinking that the 12 v could be supplied to the monitor.  However I found that if you draw current from only the 12v supply and nothing from the 5v rail the power supply thinks something bad is happening and shuts down.

I had an radio shack wall wart power supply with multiple jack sizes that plugged in - the holes looked suspiciously the same size as the pin spacing on a screw terminal that i had -  so i tried that. Voila the monitor powered up. {note to self - add picture or find link}

The second issue was even though it powered up - plugging it into the rca video gave no picture. Turns out that you had to edit the /boot/config.txt on the PI. NOOBS sets it to only work with HDMI and I had to comment out a few lines.

# NOOBS Auto-generated Settings:
#hdmi_force_hotplug=1
#config_hdmi_boost=4
#overscan_left=24
#overscan_right=24
#overscan_top=16
#overscan_bottom=16
#disable_overscan=0

Now I had video from the pie - it was a bit pixely - but entirely readable.
The arduino IDE in the GUI is larger than the screen resolution. But right clicking on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and selecting maximize fixed that. or should i say i could now select the menu items - but editing in this mode would be impossible - So its plug in the big monitor when editing, and just use the little monitor to view output.

Opening LOCALHOST on the browser gave a perfectly readable weewx screen.