I’m currently out to China to touch-panel factory to do all the best to reduce lead time of re-done batch of panels from standard 4-6 weeks down to couple weeks. Currently, we found with supplier the way to reduce it to 3 weeks.

We take full responsibility for this delay, but can’t do too much to ship panels in April, therefore we want to offer the following:
1. Any request for money return will be immediately executed.
2. For those who is OK to wait for delivery we want to offer one of the following:
– free add-on of ambient light sensor, mini USB cable, micro HDMI cable, audio adapter and power adapter (please, mention your plug type) to your order
– or free upgrade from standard shipping to DHL
– or 15% individual coupon for any future purchase in our store

Drop e-mail to our sales team (sales@) with your order # and selected action.

• fully integrated solution - no external boards and cables
• slim design (<10 mm thickness including electronic and connectors)
• totally cable-free (electronic is embedded directly to LCD)
• easy installation – just connect and it will work
• micro HDMI input accepts any resolution up to 1920x1080 (FullHD)
• slim-profile power connector (OD=2.6mm, ID=0.65mm, positive central pin)
• mini USB connector for touchscreen with dual HID - driver-less single touch, and multi-touch with additional driver
• audio engine provides decoding of HDMI stream audio and outputs it to standard 2.5mm connector
• external ambient light sensor for automatic brightness control
• internal LVDS scaler allows to get HDMI with any special settings from virtually any HDMI source, like RaspberryPi, Beagleboard/Pandaboard/new Beaglebone, Hackberry, Odroid, Cubox, mk802 and others Android stick clones, Gooseberry, Nitrogen/Sabre, OLinuXino-A13, normal PC/notebook, video players, etc.

• Display: 7” full-color a-Si TFT with IPS technology
• Native resolution: 1280x800 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 16:10 (widescreen)
• Display colors: 262K (6-bits per color)
• Active area: 152mm (H) x 95.5mm (V)
• Surface treatment: 3H glass, Glare
• Weight: 110 grams
• Input voltage: 5V DC
• Operating temp: -20C … 70C
• Storage temp: -30C … 80C
• Power consumption: 3.1W (typ)
• Brightness: 400 cd/m2 (nits)
• Contrast ratio: 800:1
• Viewing angle: 89 deg (all directions)

1. First of all, take into account that any capacitive touchscreen requires to be placed inside enclosure. This will eliminate most problems with phantom mouse shakes and clicks.
2. If you use it without enclosure, then please take care to remove any EMI emitting equipment, connected/powered wires, unbalanced fluorescent lamps, etc. as far away from touchscreen as possible. At least nothing should be under green PCB of touchscreen controller on the bottom side of LCD panel.
3. Next is power supply. Check that your power supply provides clean 5V signal on its output. We also recommend to use UPS or good power filter on AC side.
4. Finally, you can use special Windows tool to calibrate screen sensitivity to your current environment. Here is link to calibration utility: http://goo.gl/TLK4P. You should connect your panel to Windows PC, use only USB – others connectors are not required. Then run this program, it should find panel, then will ask you to not touch panel during calibration (calibration does not require any interaction with touch surface during whole procedure)

SMT pick and place machine

I receive a lot of emails requesting for stock update every day. Therefore, I decided to clear out the situation with the stock issue and also to reveal our plans for the future of our LCD products. First of all, our company has been running for 8 years in the electronic industry business. We design and manufacture embedded systems for consumer, industrial and military applications, we have our own SMT factory and experienced development team. This branch of open-source LCD solutions was initiated 2 years ago as a step to help electronic enthusiasts to get cheap and easy LCD+touch solution for their project based on BeagleBoard and their successors. We never considered this as a business, and did it mostly for fun. But 2 years of successful sales, many positive reviews and number of serious business projects that arise as a result convinced us that open-source hardware can play an important role in the business of electronic company. Therefore, we decided to pay more attention to this branch and invest money to buy separate SMT line for our LCD products. This should eliminate delays with order processing and shipping, and help us to keep constant stock of ready LCD bundles. We already received new stencil printer and lead-free reflow oven, now awaiting for arrival of automatic pick-and-place machine. Whole line should be mounted in 2-3 weeks, after that we can ship your orders next day after receiving. Currently, we had delays with LCD production because our main SMT line is busy with our normal orders for others embedded products. Separate SMD line will solve this problem.

Now regarding our plans:

1. Most of our office employees will be out for Chinese New Year holidays from 9th till 17th of February.
2. Technical support for current customers will be on line, support@ email will be active.
3. All emails sent to our sales team (sales@) will be answered after CNY holidays.
4. We will install SMT line during CNY holidays and will manufacture enough boards to keep stock alive.
5. All orders placed from today will be shipped on first come-first serve base starting from February 18.
6. As a token of appreciation for your continuous support, we will offer instant 10% discount for all orders placed and paid during this period.

Finally, our 7″ capacitive solution is near completion. You will get 1280×800 LCD (yes, IPS!) with multi-touch touchscreen with USB interface.

1. Go to http://releases.linaro.org/12.10/android/leb-panda/ and proceed with “Binary Image Installation” steps. Windows users can get file pandaboard.img.bz2, unzip it and write to SD card with Windows32DiskImager utility.
2. Update boot.scr file in boot partition of SD card with correct LCD resolution (1280×800 for LG panel). Ready boot.scr file is here: boot.scr
3. After step 2 you should get LCD working. You will see Android GUI and can use mouse. Adding touchscreen requires some kernel re-build.
4. Download file linaro_kernel_build_cmds.sh to your Linux computer, change its attribute (+x) and run it. It will automatically download and re-build kernel for Android. Final kernel is located in ./linaro-kernel/out/arch/arm/boot folder (file uImage)
5. Now you should update kernel config to include touchscreen support and re-build kernel again. Find file .config in ./linaro-kernel/out folder and uncomment/add options CONFIG_HID_MULTITOUCH=y and CONFIG_HID_NTRIG=y – first option is for old AUO panel, second is for new LG panel. You can add both just in case
6. Comment line “mkdir out/modules_for_android” in script linaro_kernel_build_cmds.sh and run it again. Copy final uImage file to boot partition of your SD card. You can also skip these steps and get my final uImage here: uImage
7. Last step is to configure touchscreen as an internal device to fit with LCD panel size. Download file Vendor_1b96_Product_0007.idc and put it to folder /usr/idc on system partition of SD card.

Final SD card image (4Gb card) is here: Android 4.1.2 for Pandaboard(ES)

Video in action is here: Android Jelly Bean (4.1.2) running on Pandaboard ES with touchscreen LCD

Download and install all required sources:

sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi git ccache libncurses5-dev u-boot-tools lzma
cd ~
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
git clone git://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-dev.git
cd linux-dev
git checkout origin/am33x-v3.2 -b am33x-v3.2
cp system.sh.sample system.sh

Then make the following changes in system.sh:
- uncomment line CC=arm-linux-gnueabi-
- uncomment line LINUX_GIT=~/linux-stable/
- uncomment line ZRELADDR=0×80008000
- uncomment line BUILD_UIMAGE=1
- uncomment and change line MMC=/dev/sde to your SD card system name (mine is /dev/sdb)

Next commands:

./build_kernel.sh

will bring you directly to kernel config GUI, and then will assemble it.

After kernel is compiled, please make changes to file ~/linux-dev/KERNEL/arch/arm/mach-omap2/board-am335xevm.c (see below), then recompile kernel again (command “tools/rebuild.sh”). Once the build had completed there will be a uImage file in ~/linux-dev/deploy. You can install this to your SD card with:

./tools/load_uImage.sh

Built kernel modules are located in ~/linux-dev/deploy/mod/lib

To add support for our LVDS cape you need to patch file board-am335xevm.c located in /kernel/arch/arm/mach-omap2. You should find function beaglebone_cape_setup(struct
memory_accessor *mem_acc, void *context) in this file and change it to always invoke function dvi_init(0,0). The easiest way is to put
the following lines:

pr_info("BeagleBone cape: initializing DVI cape\n");
dvi_init(0,0);
return;

at the beginning of function.

1. First of all, check all connections. We had many cases when customers forgot or incorrectly connected touchscreen to miniUSB add-on board.
2. Connect just touchscreen through USB cable to normal PC running Windows. If touchscreen is detected and you can use it in Windows, then all connections are OK and you can proceed further.
3. If your Linux kernel does not include drivers for touchscreen, then you should recompile kernel with the following options:
   • for AUO LCD (1024×600 px): “Device Drivers –> HID Devices –> Special HID drivers –> HID Multitouch panels“, option name: CONFIG_HID_MULTITOUCH, available in mainline kernel since version 2.6.38
   • for LG LCD (1280×800 px, black frame): “Device Drivers –> HID Devices –> Special HID drivers –> N-Trig touchscreens“, option name: CONFIG_HID_NTRIG, available in mainline kernel since version 2.6.31
4. If you run Android, then you can encounter problem with non-correct touchscreen vs screen resolution. This happen because Android supposes default screen resolution for external LCD as 720p or 1080p (touchscreen is connected by USB and is considered as external device), but our LCD is 1024×600 or 1280×800. You can easy check it by simply turning on option “Show touches” in Settings->Developer options of Android. Then you will notice the difference in real position of touch and Android touch position. This can be easy improved by placing one of below files to /system/usr/idc folder of Android rootfs. After that touchscreen size and LCD size will match.
   File for Ntrig touchscreen (1280×800, black frame)
   File for Cando touchscreen (1024×600)
   
   See below links for additional information on touchscreen devices functionality under Android:
   Touch devices in Android
   Input device configuration files
5. You can use console command getevent (sources for Linux are here: getevent.zip) to check what touchscreen returns when you touch it. Also, you can get more details about touchscreen and its modes with commands getevent -p and getevent -i.
6. N-trig touchscreen can be tuned with some parameters:
   • min_width – minimum touch contact width to accept
   • min_height – minimum touch contact height to accept
   • activate_slack – number of touch frames to ignore at the start of touch input
   • deactivate_slack – number of empty frames to ignore before deactivating touch
   • activation_width – width threshold to immediately start processing touch events
   • activation_height – height threshold to immediately start processing touch events

   They can be changed right from console, see here for details: http://baruch.siach.name/blog/posts/linux_kernel_module_parameters/

7. If you have problems with touchscreen, like “crazy” cursor jumps or “phantom” mouse clicks, then try to follow this guide How to calibrate N-Trig touchscreen
8. Still no success? Drop e-mail to support@chalk-elec.com and provide description of problem + photo of your LCD touch connection + output of commands “lsusb” and “dmesg” entered in Linux console.

1. LCD panel
2. LVDS cable with attached miniUSB connector (for touch controller) and ambient light sensor
3. HDMI-LVDS converter
4. miniUSB cable – optionally available during order
5. Power adapter (5V, at least 2A) – optionally available during order

All above you will receive with our LCD bundle order.

Also, you will need additionally:
6. SD card
7. microUSB cable to power RasPi
8. RaspberryPi board itself

Here are the steps to get LCD working:

1. Download latest image of Raspbian from www.raspbian.org or www.raspberrypi.org. I used version “2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian” for demo.

2. Create SD card based on this image.

3. – if you have 10″ LG panel and your HDMI board has U5 chip installed, then skip to p.4
– if you have 7″ CPT panel with resistive touchscreen, then download this config.txt file and put it to the root of boot partition of SD card
– if you have old HDMI board and 10″ LG panel, then open file called “config.txt” on just created SD card and add single line at the top: “hdmi_edid_file=1″, then download file edid.dat and copy it to the root of boot partition of SD card
– if you have your own LCD, then you should create binary EDID file (full file name edid.dat) yourself following datasheet of your LCD and copy this “edid.dat” file to the root of boot partition of SD card

4. Connect LVDS cable to LCD as on below photos. Cable connector should be fully inserted into mate connector on backside of LCD.

5. Connect LVDS cable to HDMI-LVDS board as on below photo. Pin 1 of cable is marked with white dot.

6. Connect microUSB cable from HDMI-LVDS board to RasPi microUSB connector.

7. Connect miniUSB cable between RasPi USB port and small red board that is part of LVDS cable.

8. Connect cable of power adapter to HDMI-LVDS board.

9. Turn on power, this will start your RaspberryPi and you should get image on screen immediately. During first run Raspbian will run configuration utility. Touchscreen is not working at yet, and you will need usual USB keyboard to enable option “Start desktop on boot”.

10. After RasPi will restart to GUI, you will be able to use touchscreen as a mouse.

Final SD card image for 10″ LCD (at least 4Gb card) is here: SD card test image
We use this SD card image to test our bundles before shipping.

Some of our first customers (who placed order in September) can encounter problems with LCD backlight. If you see that backlight is not turned on when you apply power to our HDMI-LVDS board (screen is completely black, no light from the side view of LCD), then you has 2 ways to improve this:

1. Short pins 1 and 3 on white 6-pins connector (CON4). Pin 1 has square shape, others pins have round shape. Don’t worry if you short pin 2 as well – it is not connected anywhere.
or
2. Short pins 1,2,3 on PIC microcontroller (U3). Pin 1 is marked with white dot. Don’t worry if you short pin 4 as well – it anyway tied up to power.

UPDATE: here is interesting post from one of our customers about his experience with connection of our 10″ LCD Raspberry Kiosk

We had many questions from our customers regarding video from previous post on release RaspberryPi LCD solution: http://www.chalk-elec.com/?p=1553
One guy on forum noticed that CPU usage is 100% during whole demo, others guys decided that problem is with drivers for our LCD/touchscreen and this can burn main processor

In real, problem is not with driver, but with python game Gemgem. I asked our engineer to record 2 videos: one with normal LCD monitor and mouse, and another with our LCD+touchscreen, with the same version of Raspbian and system settings as in original video. I will gift LCD bundle to first guy who will find any difference in performance on both videos.

RasPi performance with monitor+mouse

RasPi performance with LCD+touchscreen

RaspberryPi LCD solution

I know that many guys has been expecting for RasPi LCD solution from us many months ago. I personally got millions of emails and requests about the release date. We made mistakes trying to implement it with DSI interface that is available on Raspberry Pi. We even made agreement with Toshiba about their DSI-LVDS bridge IC. Unfortunately, DSI in controlled through GPU, and all GPU code is closed by Broadcom. Big mistake, that cost us several months.

Current solution works through HDMI interface. So, this adapter is pretty universal, and can be used to connect bare LCD LVDS panel also to others boards with HDMI interface (I have dozen of them on my table for tests).

You can buy our HDMI-LVDS converter and try to connect to own LCD panel, but I would suggest to get it in bundle with our 10″ LCD that has integrated multi-point capacitive touchscreen. It is just $134.99 for whole bundle – and you will get your own extra cheap ($170 including RasPi price) 10″ tablet with high quality IPS screen, a great 1280×800 resolution, capacitive multi-point touchscreen and RaspberryPi as a heart.

Video of bundle in action:

Make 10″ tablet with your RaspberryPi

Link to web-store: http://www.chalk-elec.com/?page_id=1280#ecwid:category=3094861&mode=category&offset=0&sort=priceAsc

We have limited quantity at the moment, so hurry up! Next batch will be available in September.