HDMIPi Review

 

HDMIPi Review

In five words: Buy it. Just buy it.

In five stars: ***** 

Good points:

Cheap

Beautiful quality

Works out-of the box brilliantly

Easily hackable case which fits everything needed in it.

Cons:

Case won't fit B+ Pi YET

I have recently got my hands on a HDMIPi Screen. For those of you who don't know, it's an affordable, 9-inch high-defenition screen for the Raspberry Pi. It was dreamed up by Alex Eames from the brilliant Raspi.TV, and with the help of  Cyntech, Pimoroni and £261,250 from Kickstarter, he's produced what many of us have nbeen waiting for: An affordable, nice screen for the Raspberry Pi.

Before this, it didn't make sense. You could buy a full computer for thirty quid. But you had to pay around three times that for the cheapest HD monitor. And that was huge. If you wanted it small (like, ten inches) then that was going to be somewhere around the £150 mark.  The R-Pi foundation had gone to all that trouble, making the R-Pi so small, and then you can't buy a readable screen smaller than 19 inches readily and easily. Sure, you could get little composite video screens designed for use in cars - that ranged from 2.5 to around 7-10 inches, but each pixel was massive. I used a 7 inch one in several previous portable-pi ventures, but you basically couldn't read it. You had to make the command line size 20 to be able to understand what it said. It needed a 12 volt (or at the least a 9 volt) power input. The pi runs off 5 volts, so that meant two batteries, two power switches. It was a nightmare.

When I first saw this project, about a year ago, I couldn't wait. It seemed like a dream come true. And, having now recieved one of my very own, I can happily inform you that it is a dream come true. These people have clearly taken the time to produce a product that is innovative, intuitive, and perfect for everything the user want to use it for.

Out of the box, you get:

• A 9-inch, HD LCD panel
• A driver board
• Lots of layers of acrylic.
• A bag of screws
• A piece of paper which has some interesting writing on it.

Let's start with the piece of paper. This has a link to a Raspi.TV video which tells you how to put the thing together. This is great - much better than a silly booklet.

You have to assemble the case layer by layer. It's time consuming, but all works beautifully. I strongly reccomend that you use a case - I've cracked lots of  LCDs in my time, and it's not fun or cheap. The included one is great.

The driver board contains two HDMI inputs, Micro USB and mini barrel jack power connectors, a USB power port for the pi and spaces for VGA/D-SUB and USB connectors. These aren't included, but they  can easily be soldered on. The VGA/D-SUB connector will allow you to connect peripherals with older outputs, but I haven't been able to find what it'd do if you connected a USB. My guess is that it's either more power output, or for displaying media from a USB. If you know, comment below. There are also some pushbuttons, for things like power, menus etc.

Once you connect the ribbon cable, and attatch a power supply (I used a USB one - bear in mind it has to be about 2 Amps to support the screen and the pi and any extras) then the screen turns on. It's really high quality - the screen looks great. It's 3mm thin, and has quite a low power consumption.

Mine's going to go in the pi laptop, it's currently in a top secret test facility I don't have any pictures. However, a quick check of the HDMIPi website provides some nice shots of the unit ;)

I love this screen. It will allow thousands of hobbyists to create truly portable systems, or to just have a small screen for their small computer. Thank you so much to all the people that helped make this, and to those who helped Kickstart it.

Projects in the pipeline and some Pi-Top updatement

Hi,

Just a quick update with some project ideas I have, and some updates on how the Pi-Laptop is shaping up.

I've nearly finished the laptop now, I'm just working on the case. The first test bottom layer was laser cut today, and it works great. I'm cutting the tests out of cardboard, because it's free, quick and I had loads laying around from Christmas. I got the remaining electrical bits given to me for Christmas, so a post will follow later with the part 1 build details, which will handle everything electrical and the design process for the case.

I've got a few more project ideas in the pipeline:

• A wearable - most likely a smartwatch, which I've been chatting about with some nice people over at the Pimoroni forums
• A timer-in-a-tin - probably using the Adafruit Gemma, a couple of pushbuttons and a Neopixel RGB LED. I thought it'd be fun to create a really, really small project. I've been doing lots of big ones lately, and so it's time for a small (and quick!) project, as my patience is running out! This will be a timer for those times where you don't need a specific value, for example when you only want to know roughly how long 'till your egg's done, and not when you need to have a precise lap time for a running race or something. It'll have small pushbuttons round the edge, each of which will trigger a different time (30s/1min/2min/5min/10min). The LED will cycle through a spectrum (For example, red = start, green = finish. The more green the hue of the led gets, the closer the timer is to finishing), and flash when the time's up. It'll have a teensy LiPo battery, and an on-off switch.
• A laser cutter from an inkjet printer. Now, there are a couple of articles about this on the internet. Mainly where someone enthusiastic like me says 'Why not use an old inkjet to make a laser cutter?! and some other, more experienced peoples reply with 'No, that's impossible, don't waste your time'. I think that I'm going to give it a go, starting with something really simple not involving lasers, and move onwards and upwards (or just fall crashing down) as I go on. There'll always be a use for an old inkjet printer, so I figure I have little to lose.
• A RasPi I2C circuit to automatically control model train signals based on the locations of the trains themselves

I'll update when I've done these projects and as I progress with them.

Have fun :)

Portable Workshop Project

Hello!

Sorry that it's been a monumental amount of time since the last update - it's been Christmas and in the little spare time I've had I've been frantically building projects or doing necessary things.

I built a portable workshop!

I's not great. It's not evidence of my best woodworking skills. It was designed as a quick-for-what-it-is and easy portable workshop build to allow me to make parts whilst I was away for Christmas. Basically, I was planning on receiving the final parts for Christmas, and I wanted to play with them before I got home :)

Firstly, I built 3 frames.

One was large, the other two were small (exactly half the size), so that they'd fold together to become flat. I didn't do any proper wood joints - I just slapped the two bits on top of each other and carried right on.


Next, I attached white plasticky hardboard to the dips in the middle. This would form the work surface. I cut the board slightly wrong on one of the pieces, so there was a 5mm gap at the edge. I could tell that this was just going to be a pain in the back side, so I cut a piece of acrylic on the scroll saw and screwed it down. This would also form a handy straight edge (as I used the factory-cut edge on one side so it was arrow-straight).

The built-in Acrylic Straight-edge

Shiny!

The strange paint

I then found some unopened but pretty old 'Aluminium Paint' which looked cool, so I gave it ago. By this point, it was about 11 PM and the project had to be done in 36 hours before I left, so I had to be quick. I didn't bother masking the hardboard (in hindsight, I should have just painted it before adding the hardboard), so it now has silver splodges on it. This is annoying - silver paint won't come off, no matter how many solvents are desperately applied. Scouring just removes the plastic, so I just left it.

I decided that I needed some tool storage, but since all tools will live in my 'shop permanently, and I have different needs each time the portable workshop is used, I decided to just install a redundant tool box. This was what I got given my first ever tools in (A hammer and a tape measure if I remember rightly, along with an ancient hand-me-down hand drill), so it was nice to put it into use. This was screwed onto the frame. The toolbox has a little lift out tray for screws and things, but as it would be jiggled about I didn't want them all muddled up so I scroll sawed a small piece of the white board to secure them. I also produced some acrylic-topped MDF spacers so that it is forced into position.

Toolbox in situ

 I also then fitted an extension lead (which I accidentally drilled through the cable of and took me ages to strip it and re-insulate it), so that I could get some power for my tools. At this point, time was running seriously low. I didn't have time to build a permanent flip-out storage box, so I just used an old red stacker box. Sometime soon, I'll build a nice flip-out tray at the back (Like the one in The Ben Heck Show's portable workbench. I might also salvage an old PC Power pack if I can find one to use as a PSU, and maybe install some component storage or something.


This project is not really finished yet - it was held together with bungees instead of by using a lock like I planned it to. However, it served me well over the Christmas period.


Although I often really want a 3D Printer/CNC/Laser cutter, this project was undoubtedly better hand-made. I'd have had to spend hours drawing concepts and parts, which would never have fitted anyway, and it's much easier to adjust it now and upgrade it in the future. There are some applications where CAD-CAM is great (for example if you're building an enclosure for specifically sized parts like I am with the Laptop project), but this really isn't one of them.