Adafruit 5-inch HDMI Touch Display 800×480 Tested with Raspberry Pi

Last week, I ordered this 5-inch touch display with a resolution of 800×480 pixels. I was curious to see how it would work with a Raspberry Pi and to what GLSL Hacker demos would look like.

I received the 5-inch display in small box that included:
– a 5-inch touch panel
– a mini-driver board for HDMI
– a touch controller board
– a keyboard with 5 keys

All boards and panel were connected together and ready to use:

The USB cable for the touch controller (on the right) must be connected to one of the Raspberry Pi USB ports. The USB power cable (on the left) can be connected to a USB power supply or directly to a free USB port of the Raspberry Pi. If you decide to plug all USB cables on the Raspberry Pi board, you have to edit the /boot/config.txt and turn on high current USB capability:

max_usb_current = 1

This is important!

Here are some detailed pictures of the mini-driver and touch controller boards:

To make my tests easier, I quickly built a small case for the display with a small carton:

When you connect the 5-inch display the first time, the default resolution of 640×480 is used. Once again, you have to edit the /boot/config.txt file to set correct parameters for the display:

# uncomment if hdmi display is not detected and composite is being output
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
 
# uncomment to force a specific HDMI mode (here we are forcing 800x480!)
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=1
hdmi_mode=87
hdmi_cvt 800 480 60 6 0 0 0

Once edited, you can reboot the RPi. Now you should have a resolution of 800×480 pixels:

I tested some GLSL Hacker demos for Raspberry Pi (OpenGL ES 2.0) that are included in the code sample pack of GLSL Hacker (in the gles2/ folder). But before launching the demos, you have to edit them and change the resolution to 800×480 in the main XML file. Alternatively, you can force a particular resolution with the command line:

$ GLSLHacker /width=800 /height=400 /demofile=\"./demos/vertex_pool_particles/demo_sphere_gles2.xml\"

It was pretty cool to see these demos on this tiny screen:

I also tested VPlay with some movie trailers in HD resolution (here, the trailer of Pixels):

And the touch function? Don’t expect to have the same touch level than on you smartphone. The touch works on the desktop to select things, but I didn’t manage to move a window with my finger. And in a GLSL Hacker demo, the touch does not work. Maybe I need to install a special version of Raspbian with some built-in touchscreen support…