A friend has a few Elo Touchscreens from a past venture, and I have racked my brain trying to figure out a use for them. After giving up on Android PCs, I took a stab with a Raspberry Pi Model B running the Raspbian image from Noobs. Two obstacles presented themselves:
- The Raspberry Pi only outputs HDMI. For now, I'm going to try an HDMI to VGA converter. Better to get this thing off the ground than hem and haw about a 'better' solution.
- The touchscreen is inverted. For this, I installed the xinput-calibrator tool per the instructions on the Raspberry Pi forums given by msmithy12 and a helpful config guide:
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
sudo apt-get install libxext-dev
sudo apt-get install libxi-dev
sudo apt-get install x11proto-input-dev
download http://github.com/downloads/tias/xinput_calibrator/xinput_calibrator-0.7.5.tar.gz
tar xvzf (downloaded file)
cd (downloaded file)
./configure
make
sudo make install
Then, from the menu: Preferences/Calibrate Touchscreen
- Do not immediately follow the instructions given when you run calibration (place the calibration in a /etc/Xll/...). Doing so borked my Raspbian install. Instead, create the file specified in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/. I ran "sudo leafpad 99-calibration.conf" to create and edit the file. After dropping in the calibration indicated, I restarted and found out it stuck. Woo hoo!
I will update this space with my progress. Currently, the setup is:
- Raspberry Pi Model B ($35)
- Elo Touchscreen ET1939L (Pre-owned)
- BYTECC HM-VGA005 HDMI-A to VGA Female Adapter/Converter ($20)
- 1 x WiFi Dongle (Ralink RT5370 chipset) ($10)
Lessons Learned
- Single User Mode could have beenused to save my Raspbian install. It can be entered by adding init=/bin/sh to cmdline.txt. I was using Noobs, so holding Shift while the PI boots got me into the editor.
- I like Linux more and more each project.
