I have a ras pi 2 and a 3.5 inch touchscreen. When I bought the screen I was hoping for a mobile computer, but it didn’t take me long to realize 3.5 inches is useless on a full OS. So now I’ve fallen back to plan of using osmc for cool media center. Hooked up to flat screen via hdmi and using an android app for control, got the setup doing pretty good. But my brain doesn’t like unused hardware, so I’ve got some ideas for the touchscreen.
Ideally I would love if I could configure it as a type of remote control setup. Nothing fancy just up/down side/side buttons, plus enter and back buttons. Barring that, I would like to have a kind of status view. Like a terminal showing the ongoing log. After an hour of research, I’ve found some info on 7 inch screens and 10 inch screens, but those are assuming to be main display. Closer to what I’m looking for was info on 2 line by 16 character screens, but the process that writes to those has a set list of hardware drivers, and doesn’t seem capable of entering info for a screen not hard coded.
So can anyone point me in a direction? I can do some coding myself, and am not scared of research, but I am unfamiliar with the background processes for OSMC. Is there a addon that will allow me to write info to the gpio pins used for my screen? I think I remember an addon that prints log messages.
Let me get this straight…You have set up the pi2 with osmc and its hooked up to your TV doing things on its own…And you want to use the screen on another pi for remote control ? Because you said ‘remote control’…and i cant think of how you’ll achieve this with the screen connected on the same pi under your tv.
If you mean to have a separate pi with this screen on, then you can install Raspbian on it, and control the pi with the webrowser controller. You just have to enable it on your 1st pi2, from the System settings, and download a good skin, because the default skin is a bit crappy for what you want to do.
Then from the 2nd pi with the touchscreen open a browser (or have it automatically start and set the homepage to your 1st pi webgui) and boom…you got a remote controller.
If you are thinking of using it on the same pi as the tv I think you may be out of luck.
If it’s one of the cheaper chinese designs with it’s own driver, like the KeDei 3.5 inch, the driver only outputs to hdmi or lcd, not both at once.
If you want a completely different idea, I use a pi with a 3.5 inch screen attached to my printer. Turns my old deskjet printer/scanner into a wireless print server for the network. The screen shows printer status and ink levels, and has touch buttons for scan/copy and a scroll box to select how many copies. I could probably have just bought a newer printer with those features built in, but like you I don’t like unused hardware lying around and the pi was sitting in a drawer once my pi3 arrived. Oh, and spliced into the printer power feed and run it through a 12v to 5v dc converter to power the pi