The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used within the authentic Steam Deck will be had for round $30. It is a serviceable 7″ touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a decision of 1280×800 (for a pointy 216 ppi).
The specs are quite a bit nicer than the Pi 7″ Contact Show, which prices twice as a lot, with big bezels and half the decision!
Till in the present day, the Steam Deck LCD did not work with a Raspberry Pi. However the people at Scandent have been making an attempt to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one among their very own units, and constructed a Linux kernel driver for it which they intend to upstream.
Not solely that, they’ve open sourced a Pi HAT design which adapts the Raspberry Pi 5 or CM4’s MIPI connection to the particular 39-pin connector on the Steam Deck LCD.
The repository linked above has detailed construct directions, and the KiCAD challenge if you would like to construct a HAT of your individual. Scandent was sort sufficient to ship me not one however two prototype HATs (the primary one was broken in delivery), and I put collectively this setup for testing:
Scandent is not planning on productizing the HAT, they only wished an honest touchscreen they may use that will likely be in good provide for no less than a couple of years. Making it extra accessible to hobbyists or others constructing Pi-based touchscreen tasks ought to strengthen the marketplace for this LCD, too.
From what I perceive, LCD panels like these are sometimes constructed for a particular goal, and if a product line that makes use of it stops being manufactured, the particular LCD will get discontinued in some unspecified time in the future, which means downstream customers should work on supporting one other one.
Similar to switching from one SoC to a different creates annoying rework, making an attempt to sync up {hardware} signaling and a working kernel driver with a number of touchscreens is a ache.
I examined the Steam Deck LCD on a Raspberry Pi 5, and located it to work fairly nicely. In particular person, I did not see any actual flickering or waviness, and brightness was good, even below my studio lights.
The contact targets are slightly bit iffy on the Pi’s default decision scaling, however in the event you bump that up or construct your individual HMI/UI, you can also make this factor fairly usable. Possibly somebody on the market will construct out the remainder of the {hardware} and a 3D print for a RetroPie-based open supply Steam Deck?
