BW 3.5 Inch TFT LCD Monitor for Car / Automobile

The product works fantastic. Good service.

This monitor, like I've put in the title, was bought for a Raspberry Pi. I didn't want to spend on anything larger than what was needed, and didn't want to connect to a TV at all, since the Pi is just meant to be a fun, homebrew-style computer, and I wanted to build it as cheaply as possible. With that said, the monitor is not only cheap, but it WORKS and works well.First of all, in describing it, the screen size that you will get out of the box is about the size of a PalmPilot's (close to 3.5"), and it will come with a flexible arm and mini-stand attached to it that you can adjust however you like, with a sticker underneath in case you want to mount it to anything. In short, it is really a baby LCD flat panel.On the back are three buttons: Menu, +, and -. There is no menu--simply press the buttons to alternate between Brightness, Contrast, and "Colorast" (or how much color you want--0 is grayscale), and finally OK or Reset. With that said, settings are very simple to configure on it.Now, we get to the last (and fun) part. You can splice two cords together to get power if you wish, but I simply connected a 1.0 A (1000 mA), 12 V (and under 4 W) power adapter, which works efficiently well. I'm mentioning this to be helpful in case anyone else wants to connect this to their favorite little computer using an easier method. :) You can easily connect any spare yellow RCA video cable, and the picture is surprisingly clear! To get specific, with good enough eyes, you can read 12 pt text in Sans or Monospace (though anything lower becomes harder to read--although I can still read size 10) and this monitor drives a 656x416 resolution according to xrandr (a little bit under 640x480). This is with overscan on (which means the screen puts an artifical box around the screen so it fits better) and I recommend you turn this on. Without it, maximized windows will exceed the screen space, making things a bit monotonous. Now, without overscan, it does about 712 instead of 656 if I remember right. This is totally up to you. Also, I find tilting it up a bit on a desk, and sitting closer to it helps make the experience a bit better.And so far... all my shells show up clearly, and everything seems to be working fine. There's barely any flicker I can see with my configuration, and it displays nicely. With all this said, that is the story thus far with this screen connected to a Raspberry Pi as a monitor, and I hope others find this helpful when setting it up. :)

I bought this for my Raspberry Pi in the hopes of making a small, mobile platform. So far, it is working well.First the good news:-Its a good deal for the money (at least I think so)-It will power up on as little as 5v DC! I wired it to the power leads of a USB cable, and to my surprise it came on! My idea of running both the Pi and the screen on an RC car battery may not be so far fetched after all! :)-With a little work, it looks really good in text mode. Still working on getting LXDE to look good.sudo nano /boot/config.txtchange the lines "framebuffer_width=640" and "framebuffer_height=480"This will get you off to a good start, you can modify the overscan settings as well.The bad news:-It really is small, 3.5" isn't much space to work with. GUI mode requires more work than I have already put in to make it readable in all programs, but I'm sure it can be done...-Requires diving into some settings files using root privileges-It is not as clear as HDMI or even VGA for that matter. Remember old analog TV broadcasts and how the text on the evening news looked? Yeah, a bit like that.-It has a noticeable flicker. I don't know if this is due to the screen itself or the fact that I have compact fluorescent lighting (Remember the old days of CRT computer monitors? Had to crank the refresh rate up from 60Hz to 75Hz to get rid of the flicker under fluorescent lighting) I'm not yet sure if the refresh rate is adjustable. It may require a hardware hack that is beyond my current skill level.The bad news really isn't all that bad when you consider that it is using an analog connection. However, if you are expecting the sharpness and resolution that is available on current smartphones, you will be sorely disappointed.I have cracked the housing open to see how hackable it is and found that the ribbon cable that goes from the controller board to the LCD screen is about the same size as the ribbon connector on the Raspberry Pi (Model B) that has been identified as a display connector. I have no idea if it would work and I didn't want to risk causing irreparable damage to the screen in the process of finding out. So I left it as it was and reassembled it. It would be interesting if this screen could be hacked to accept a digital input...

Wouldn't come on. Tried several times.