The folks at Raspberry Pi have announced a new touchscreen component for people using boards to create miniature touchscreen appliances: The 5-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 is a 720p IPS multi-touch screen that's natively supported by the Raspberry Pi OS and includes mounting holes on the back to make it easy to build integrated all-in-one devices.
The new screen will cost $40 and is available starting today from Pi resellers like CanaKit, Vilros, and PiShop (though some of those retailers already list it slightly above the MSRP).
"Its capacitive touch screen works out of the box with full Linux driver support—no manual calibration required, no hunting through device trees, and no wrestling with incompatible touch controllers," writes Raspberry Pi software CTO Gordon Hollingworth in the company's blog post.
The 5-inch touchscreen is a smaller counterpart to the $60 7-inch Pi Touch Display 2 that the company launched late last year. The two screens have the same 720p resolution, but the 7-inch model has slightly wider viewing angles (85 degrees, compared to 80 degrees for the 5-inch screen). Both are compatible with all Pi boards from 2014's Raspberry Pi 1 B+ onward—with the exception of the Raspberry Pi Zero—and they use power from the board's GPIO header and a display signal delivered via a ribbon cable connected to the boards' DSI port.
Like the 7-inch screen, the 5-inch version can detect up to five touchscreen inputs at once, and it doesn't require a separate power supply when attached to the Pi board. Raspberry Pi OS can automatically detect when one of the touchscreens is installed and offers the Squeekboard onscreen keyboard to allow input without external accessories.
The 5-inch touchscreen is a good fit for smaller smart home projects that benefit from some kind of a screen for controls—or if you just have a Pi sitting in a corner somewhere running Homebridge or a VPN server or something that you'd like to be able to control or interact with in a pinch without using an external monitor, keyboard, or mouse (or a remote-access technology like SSH). It's not exactly a groundbreaking project, and it's hardly the first touchscreen for the Pi, but as an inexpensive and officially supported accessory, it may benefit from wider compatibility and ecosystem support than some third-party screens.
In addition to the 5- and 7-inch models of the Touch Display 2, Raspberry Pi also offers a $100 15.6-inch portable display for people using a Pi board (or the Raspberry Pi 400 or 500 devices) as regular desktop computers.
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