Touchscreen monitor to use

[lefartenshisten]

I am looking to buy a touchscreen for my Pine64+, but I don't know which one to buy. I am looking for one between 4'' to 7'' and relatively inexpensive.

[MichaelMeissner]

I haven't received my pine64 so what I say is mostly theory....

Right now, the only monitor that probably works is the 7" LCD touch screen that was part of the kickstarter campaign. If you didn't order one as part of the original campaign, you will need to wait for the retail store to open (in theory, it is supposed to open today on May 1st, but I take promised dates with grains of salt). I suspect the monitor only works with Android, and not with Linux.

Besides its own monitor, pine64 only has HDMI support. However, there are complaints that currently pine64 only supports one size of monitor (it doesn't resize the screen to the monitor). Assuming that this hurdle is eventually fixed, the next step is the touch control. Many of the monitors with touch screen use SPI or i2c to deliver the touch results. Somebody would have to write code to convert those codes to the pine64. In addition, you might need to slice open the i2c/spi wires, and connect them directly to the screen.

There are some touch monitors that output the touch as a standard USB mouse. Once Pine64 supports alternate sized screens, it should be fairly simple to use one of these monitors.

Waveshare makes some monitors with USB touch screens:

• 7" lcd, capacitive touch: http://www.waveshare.com/product/modules...m?___SID=U;
  
• 5" lcd, resistive touch: http://www.waveshare.com/product/modules...-lcd-b.htm
  

Note, given how power hungry monitors can be and the usual complaints that pine64 needs good power supplies, even if the monitor supports 5v USB power, you should plan to power it with a separate 5v connection.