Having recently bought a 7″ touch screen for my Raspberry Pi 4 I found that there were no clear, straight forward instructions on how to connect the two together. So we wrote this. With pictures!
Getting Started
The touch screen comes with just a few basic parts as it already has the graphics component mounted on the back.
You will find the following:
- x4 wires (red, black, yellow & green)
- Ribbon cable
- 4 screws
What we will eventually do is add the Raspberry Pi onto the back of the touch screen, which will then be connected via x2 cables (black and red) and the ribbon cable.
Wiring up the touch screen board
First step is to connect the ribbon cable to the monitor board (area highlighted with the yellow circle). For this you’ll need to make sure that
a) the clip tags are open. This is quite fiddly but ‘pinch’ them by the sides and gently pull forward
b) Make sure the end of the strip is metal side down i.e. facing the board. Slide in the ribbon cable ensuring that it is level and reaches to the end of the slot, then close the sides.
Next steps are to connect the power to the monitor from the Raspberry; this will be to the right of the section highlighted in blue in the picture above. For this you will need the red and black wires, these need to be connected into the following slots:
- 5V – Red wire
- GND – Black wire
Now we’re ready to connect the Raspberry Pi board to the back of the touch screen.
Connecting the Raspberry to the touch screen panel
Take the Raspberry Pi board and mount it on the touch screen the right way round (line up the ribbon card slots) and attach using the 4 screws provided.
The next step is to connect the wire and ribbon to the Raspberry Pi board. The 2 screen grabs above should (hopefully) help to show how this all fits together.
Attach the ribbon card to the Raspberry slot in the same way that you would have done earlier; carefully opening the clips by lifting them and inserting the ribbon so that the silver slide faced the board (you can’t really do it any other way round). You will see from the above picture that the writing on the ribbon faces out.
Now we just need to connect the black and red wire to the Raspberry Pi, ensuring that they go in the right pin slots.
- Black wire (GND) – Pin No. 6
- Red wire (5V) – Pin No. 2
The above side view picture should help you work out which pin is which but essentially if you look at the Raspberry Pi board (with the pin board on the left hand side), the pins are numbered from left to right; odd numbers on the right and even on the left. Therefore you are connecting both wires to the left hand side.
Once everything is connected you can power up in the usual way. There’s no need to do anything else in terms of formatting, writing to SD cards are going into settings as the latest version does it all for you. Enjoy!
