Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
are not externally powered and draw their power from the USB cable that it uses to
connect to your computer (in this case, the Raspberry Pi). Since you're trying to work
around the power limitations of the Raspberry Pi, this really will not work. If you want
more of the gory details about why, see
Hack #08
.
You will be connecting two devices to the USB hub: your touchscreen and your
portable SSD, so make sure your hub has enough juice coming from its power adapter
to provide .5 A to two ports.
Software
Technically, you could use almost any Linux distribution here, but we strongly recom-
mend using RaspBMC for this purpose. This customized version of Debian with XBMC
preinstalled is ideal for the needs of this hack. XBMC is a robust and featureful suite
of software that provides a GUI interface for a media center. RaspBMC has been cus-
tomized specifically to support the hardware decoding and output features of the
Raspberry Pi.
Connect your Raspberry Pi to your touchscreen (video to the HDMI port) and your
external USB hub. Plug the touchscreen's USB cable into the USB hub, along with a
normal keyboard and mouse. You'll need these input devices at first, because the
touchscreen won't work yet. Then insert a new SD card into your Linux laptop and
install RaspBMC onto it. We have a whole hack on how to install RaspBMC to the Pi,
so flip over to
Hack #54
and follow those instructions. Come back when you're done;
we'll wait.
What About OpenELEC?
If you want to use something other than RaspBMC, OpenELEC will probably work,
but you'll need to build a custom kernel for it that has support for touchscreens. If
you follow the instructions in
Hack #22
, it should work.
Welcome back! You should now have a shiny (and Raspberry-tinted) RaspBMC ses-
sion displaying on your touchscreen.
Enabling Touchscreen Support
If you touch the touchscreen now, you will probably notice that it does respond, but
not properly. The mouse cursor will jump around, seemingly at random. It isn't really
random, though; it just isn't properly calibrated yet. The good news is that it is already
detected, and the proper Linux kernel drivers are loaded (RaspBMC is very clever).
To calibrate the touchscreen, you will need to SSH into the RaspBMC session to enable
the touchscreen. To determine the IP address of your Raspberry Pi, navigate (with the
