After making the Arduino ticket gate I’ve been inspired to play with some of the other “maker” offerings available. I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi Zero W to experiment with. That actually takes the Raspberry Pi in the house to three as I previously bought my son a Kano Computer, which also uses a Pi board.
The Raspberry Pi can be hooked up to a standard HDMI monitor, but I wanted to try something a bit smaller so I obtained an Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT Plus and a 5.0″ HDMI touchscreen. The former came with a badly soldered header and I’ve yet to get it working. Its instructions are also woefully out of date and unsuitable for the current Raspbian Stretch version of the Linux OS.
For both screens what you need is the LCD-Show code. However, if, like me, you installed Raspbian via NOOBS then you are likely to get a kernel panic after installing. Don’t panic!
I found these instructions to be helpful, but in my case I needed to slightly modify the boot partition statement.
- You need to edit /boot/cmdline.txt on the SD card, either before your Pi reboots or using a second Linux machine (fortunately I had the other Raspberry Pi Zero and a MicroSD card reader to do this on).
- Replace root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 with root=/dev/mmcblk0p7
If editing on a second computer put the MicroSD back in the Pi’s slot and reboot.
Everything should now work and you’ve now got a small Linux device. Not as small as my old Zaurus handheld PC’s but a lot more hackable.
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| Size comparison between the Raspberry Pi with 5″ screen and a standard mouse |
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