Raspberry Pi 7" Touch Screen & Case Assembly Guide

Element 14 has released 7" Capacitive touch screen for Raspberry Model A+, B+, Pi 2 and Pi 3 to turn it into an all-in-one tablet like embedded system. As it is really a very good quality product to make IoT devices with touch screen capability. This kit comes with only the front LCD panel. There's no back cover. But there are a lot of back covers available in the market. In this tutorial, I'm going to guide you assemble the LCD panel with Raspberry PI and case. First, we look at the technical specification of the LCD.

Technical Specification:

7" Touchscreen Display
Screen Dimensions: 194mm x 110mm x 20mm (including stand-offs)
Viewable screen size: 155mm x 86mm
Screen Resolution 800 x 480 pixels
10 finger capacitive touch
Connects to the Raspberry Pi board using a ribbon cable connected to the DSI port
Adapter board is used to power the display and convert the parallel signals from the display to the serial (DSI) port on the Raspberry Pi
Will require the latest version of Raspbian OS to operate correctly

What's in the box:

7" Touchscreen Display
Adapter Board
DSI Ribbon cable
4 x stand-offs and screws
4 x jumper wire

Assembling Kit:

Things come with box shown in follows.

Construction is just simple. Turn the LCD over and keep it on the somewhere safe surface. Adapter board already mounted with LCD and ribbon cables. Raspberry PI mounting stand-offs also already fixed. No need to worry about adapter board mounting.

First, You have to connect DSI ribbon cable to the connector on the top of the adapter board. Pull the clamp out and insert ribbon cable with the blue mark on one end towards the back of the LCD.

If you use the touch, you have to connect +5v, SDA, SCL and GND using the jumper wire with Raspberry PI I2C pins. Otherwise, +5V and GND is enough. No need to connect SDA and SCL. If you anticipate running Windows 10 on Raspberry PI, you have to connect INT jumper wire too. Here I'm going to connect all the five pins with Raspberry PI and my colour code as follows.

	+5V    - Red
	INT     - Orange
	SDA    - Green
	SCL    - Yellow
	GND   - Brown

Jumper wires are connected with adapter board as follows.

Mount your Raspberry PI onto the four stand-offs with the screws come with the kit.

Connect the other end of DSI ribbon cable to the connector on the top of the Raspberry PI. Pull the clamp out and insert ribbon cable with the blue mark towards the outside of the Raspberry PI.

Now, You have to connect jumper wire with Raspberry PI header. Models A, B and Models A+, B+, PI2 headers and connection pins as follows.

Now you have done all the wire connection.

Finally, Insert your latest Rasbian OS SD Card into the card socket and complete mounting the back cover.

Now, Assembling is completed and connect the mini USB to the Raspberry PI.

Switch on the power and watch your Raspberry PI boot. Have you seen something wrong? Yes, You can see upside down view.

You have to edit /boot/config.txt file by connection to the Raspberry PI and insert following line at the bottom of the file. Then reboot

lcd_rotate=2

Now you can see the right view of the LCD and you can operate the UI using the touch screen.

Note: Here I have used latest released version of Raspbian OS (Raspbian Jessie with PIXEL - 2017-01-11). If you use older version of Raspbian OS, make sure that your OS has updated to the latest version of Raspbian before starting assembled kit

You can update your OS to the latest using following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-net-mods