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.

New things! Product reviews

I recently ordered some stuff in the post for an upcoming project: A real Raspberry Pi laptop. Not a screen in a flight case. Not a Motorola lapdock. A real, proper, nice-to-use laptop. I've been ordering some components off the internet, and I am hoping to get some more for Christmas. For those who are interested, it will use a B+ Pi, an HDMIPi screen, a USB track-pad off eBay, and a Pimoroni Display-O-Tron 3000 (or DOT3K), for added cool-factor and amazingness. This could also prove useful for coding too - I'll explain some more in the next update.

Also, I'd like to say a huge thanks to all the people who designed, made, supported, kick-started (I wasn't able to unfortunately) the HDMIPi. It's so wonderful to have something made specifically to work with a RasPi. No more internet guesswork, money wasting, de-soldering unnecessary parts. It also comes with a 5V USB Input plug! This is fantastic, as it's nigh on impossible to get readily available 12V batteries, and LiPos are quite unsafe, bulky, and need big (and quite expensive) chargers. THANK YOU!

So today (and technically yesterday and Tuesday too), four of the components arrived in the post.

                     ~Stuff Review!~

Firstly, I bought a Lumsing 6000MAh battery pack off of Amazon. I was originally planning on using a normal Lithium-Polymer(LiPo) battery off of the internet, which could have given me a full 11.1 volts, but the wonderful HDMIPi can run itself and a pi off 5V. The Raspberry Pi Spy used a similar battery pack in his portable pi build here, and when I asked him if this slightly cheaper and slimmer one would work, he thought it'd do the trick. I hope it will, as I do not have either the HDMIPi or a new B+ Pi yet. I bought this one, which at the time I bought it (last Sunday) cost me about £17, including shipping. They do fluctuate in price quite a lot, so it's worth checking and checking back from time to time. The battery pack is nice, it's brushed aluminium, painted blue (because why not). It comes with some quite funny translated-from-Chinese instructions, and a nice springy coiled up cable. It's really thin, but it does weigh quite a bit (4.94oz according to the website).It gives out 5V at a full 2.1A, and apparently can charge an iPhone 6 two times over.  It also has a slightly pointless torch light - not sure that's really incredibly useful to anybody but there we go. As I haven't got the remaining components yet, I'll have to do a Pt 2 review later when I have built the laptop, but the RPI Guy says that he got 2 and 3/4 hours out of it!

The second thing I bought was an HDMI Male-Female coupler like this one. It's going to be used to make the second HDMI imput port on the display's driver board more accessible, so that I can plug other stuff into the laptop and use it as an HD display. Because of the size of the keyboard, the screen and the driver board will be some distance from the edge of the laptop, so I got this to help make it more easy to use. In terms of a review, it's small, quite cheap and it works.

The third thing I got was a really really slim HDMI cable. HDMI cables are usually as thick as a hosepipe, and when it's inside a laptop that just doesn't seem practical - it needs to turn tight corners and coil up and things like that. I can't find the actual eBay item I have, as they seem to go on and off eBay quite a bit but you can find one by just searching for 'slim/thin/flexible HDMI lead' or whatever. Now, when they say thin, they mean thin. This thing is about as thick as a standard USB cable, if not thinner. When you look at normal HDMI cables, that is very impressive. I have no idea how they managed to squeeze however many cores into a cable that thin, but congratulations to whoever did it. It;s a really nice cable - it's thin, nice and short, and the plugs are quite small too. And it only cost about
£3.

The last thing is the best - the Pimoroni Slim Chiclet Keyboard. It's great - it's wonderfull slim, nice to type on and the keys make a rather pleasing clicky sound when you press them. It didn't cost too much (a whole £8 I think), and it will suit the Laptop perfectly. The keyboard is what makes it so wide - I really hate those mini keyboard which have buttons like a mobile phone, because if you want to type an email or whatever they're really not practical. My only gripe is that the cable is quite long - about 1.5 meters by the looks of things, but as Pimoroni's Jon pointed out to me on the forums, I will probably splice it at some point as there should only be four internal wires. The sticker on the back also says that it needs just 25mA, and the battery pack gives out 2.1A so the burn shouldn't be that heavy.

If you've got any questions, please comment below.

Thanks for reading!
Archie

Hi

Hi

I'm Archie, I'm 15, and I live in the UK. I love to build stuff in my spare time, from websites to carts.

I still regard myself as a beginner really - I  have fairly limited experience in most areas (electronics, python programming, web programming, arduino, woodwork, plastic-work, working with textiles....), but I'm better at some than others.

Most of what I learn comes from the brilliant online community. The best way to learn things in my opinion, is by doing them. Not by reading a book that tells you the right way to do things, but by looking at what other people have done, and amalgamating ideas, adding your own touch, learning from others' mistakes and generally developing over time.

I've started this blog as a means of showing others what I do (as some of my projects are pretty unique), and helping them learn from what I've done, and build stuff too. I want to 'put something back into the community', if you like.

I'm not going to commit myself to post every week/month/year etc, as I'll never stick to it and the main reason I build these things is for the fun of building them and to have a cool finished product, not to rush them in order to get a blog post up about them on the same day. That said, I will try and give regular updates on what I'm up to, and updates on my works in progress.

If you want to know some more details, or ask a question (however basic/complex - I'll try and help if I can!), then please get in touch with me in the comments, or on the contact page.

Have fun :)

Archie