OpenAuto Pro: Uctronics 7″ HDMI/USB touchscreen

This entry is part 19 of 19 in the series Subaru Legacy
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Finally got round to completing my OpenAuto Pro 15 + RPi4 project. I did install it a while ago, briefly, but took it out after I broke the screen.

Official RPi Screen – no more

I had been using an official RPi 7″ touchscreen, which I had cut (stoopid, pointless) side bevels off. Anyway. The glass broke in the one I’d installed in the car. My advice: forget the Official RPi touchscreen, it seem to have NO redeeming features over Uctronics 7″ HDMI/USB touchscreen, other than not using a USB port.

Cutting off Official RPi Touchscreen edges to fit double-DIN size never wnet well.

I have replaced with a Uctronics 7″ HDMI/USB touchscreen:

  • The USB ports for power and touch are on the side of the unit, which would get in the way of the double DIN car head unit width if you had plug hanging out. Turns out there are some little contacts on the back you can solder into.
  • I cut off the screw mounting tabs to fit my case.
  • The screen comes with a Micro HDMI male to HDMI female adapter cable and a HDMI to HDMI 180° converter, so you can plug straight into the RPi4 HDMI0 port.
Solder point for 5V power and USB, so you don’t need to used side ports
Adapter that comes with screen to fix the HDMI issue.

Resolution

The screen’s native resolution is 1024×600. It auto-downscales a 1920×1080 HDMI input.

The instructions give you instructions for setting up a 1024×768 resolution on RPi4 – I would not bother:

  1. OpenAuto Pro works great in downscaled 1920×1080 on the screen
  2. I ran the scripts as per the instructions and lost the boot/config.txt I had set up. I had to retrace steps of setting up OpenAuto Pro and the CarPiHat. Grrrr.

Series navigation

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