There’s now an official Raspberry Pi touchscreen

Building a Raspberry Pi-powered basic tablet or control panel just got a lot easier, as there’s now an official Raspberry Pi touchscreen that can be purchased for $60. Naturally, for a touchscreen that’s so affordable, it isn’t exactly top-tier with its 7-inch 800×480, but that’s to be expected coming from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The whole purpose of Raspberry Pi is to give creative minds a simple and affordable way to bring their ideas to life using a single-board computer and basic hardware, and this new touchscreen is perfect for that. 

Although it’s pretty easy to hook up a Raspberry Pi to a screen using its HDMI port, it’s not exactly the most portable of solutions (especially if there isn’t a TV or monitor around). The Raspberry Pi Foundation recognized this, so it set about finding a “simple, embeddable display” capable of giving Pi owners a screen from which to work from, but that also embodies the DIY spirit of the board that it connects to. It’s taken almost a year, but the official Raspberry Pi touch display has gone on sale today, offering tinkerers a 7-inch capacitive 800 x 480 touchscreen display that supports 10-finger touch. As you’d expect, connecting the display to the Pi requires a steady hand and a little patience — it’s not as easy as plugging in two ends of an HDMI cable (but that’s all part of the charm, right?). You can choose to power it via the Pi’s GPIO port or by plugging a microUSB power supply into the display board, while a ribbon cable connects to the Pi’s DSI port. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has ensured that both the display board and the Pi itself can be mounted on the back of the display (as shown in the image above), making it a lot easier to connect the various cables and also to store.