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.