Elmwood no more, long live Elmwood! Elmwood Electronics and PiShop are now together!
Please order via PiShop.ca, as we are no longer taking orders through this site.
More details are in our blog!
1928
Yes, this is a cute little 5" TFT display with WVGA 800x480 resolution and a cute little driver board. We tried to get the smallest display that would be good for embedded computing usage and at a good price. And we also tried to match it with a small driver board that can be powered from a USB port. The visible display measures 5" diagonal and is a 'raw' TTL display as is used in portable electronics. The driver board only has an HDMI input but for Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black and other computers, HDMI is the best quality output available. The display is very easy to use - simply connect the USB power cable to 5V power supply that can provide 500mA, then connect a digital video source to one of the HDMI port. Voilà, a display!
It is not an IPS display so its best for direct viewing, our 7" and 10" HDMI IPS displays are designed for any angle view.
There's a little wired PCB with little buttons that let you enter a menu system for adjusting brightness, color and contrast. It tries to auto-detect which input you have and switches to that one or you can 'select' from the menu keypad which to display.
To demonstrate it, we took some photos with the display connected to a Raspberry Pi, but it will also work connected to any device with HDMI output.
For use with a Raspberry Pi we suggest editing config.txt to set the HDMI to 800x480 in case it doesn't detect the resolution properly. You can see our suggested config.txt in the Technical details tab. The easiest way to edit the config.txt is to put the Pi SD card into an every day computer and edit config.txt with any text editor and save. For use with a Beagle Bone Black, we found it works when plugged in, no configuration required.
We show the TFT above on a wire stand, which is not included. You can pick up one of these nice stands over here. If you want to extend the FPC cable between the driver and the TFT, you can grab a 10" long cable and swap it for the 4" one included.
A power adapter is not included or required! Use a 500mA-capable 5V USB port or you can cut the USB power cable and re-wire to another 5V source.