I’ll start at the beginning. I have a car that I want to add auxiliary gauges in the dash using a 7” touch screen display. There’s a tutorial on YouTube walking through all the steps to do it (Beavis Motorsport posted a video of the work that Bartonek Drag Racing did). I bought my Pi5 and couldn’t get it to boot up. Turns out the power supply wasn’t powerful enough. After that, it still didn’t work. Then I found out this tutorial isn’t compatible with Pi5. So I loaded DietPi on my own, and still tried to follow the steps in the tutorial for optimizing the boot, loading directly into Tuner Studio, and having an auto shutdown. I met someone else on YouTube who recommended using a 7” Vocore display, which I bought. I couldn’t get that to work either.
This is my first experience with Raspberry Pi. I contacted Vocore and they said their drivers are for a 6.6 kernel, I’m using 6.12. I tried switching to the 6.6 kernel using AI, but was unsuccessful. I realized that display is more for developers than the general public like me, so I bought another display from Amazon that’s plug and play (Hosyond 7” touchscreen). The Pi5 mounts to the back of the display, it has 2 spring loaded terminals that make contact with the Pi for power, and there’s a ribbon cable for the rest of the connections. That didn’t work either. No power, no lights came on. I just doesn’t respond. I checked the orientation of the ribbon, it is all correct. I realized this is probably not made for DietPi, so reached out to Hosyond tech support, and sure enough they said it’s for traditional Raspberry Pi only.
I’m at a loss and am asking for some direction. The RPi5 works with an HDMI computer monitor just fine. I want to know how to get either of the 7” touch screen displays to work.
Also, if anyone has gotten the Beavis Motorsport/Bartonek software to work on a Pi5 that would be great too. Bartonek put a ton of work into this through the years, but stopped sharing updates to the project a few years ago. Now it appears he has taken his ideas commercial and is selling his products as a professional kit. I can’t say that I blame him.
Does it work with RPi OS?
And did you try to set it up with dietpi-config? Or did you just connect it? You probably need to set up an overlay, which is automatically done on RPi OS but not on DietPi.
Whatever works on RPi OS should work on DietPi. Both are Debian based using the very same kernel and drivers. DietPi has less packages preinstall to keep it diet. Means its a matter of packages and config.
Also, check the SPI settings. I think that I had it disabled when I was trying to use the 7” monitor but as soon as I added my CAN HAT, I had problems. I had to re-enable SPI and that (I believe) is what caused me to have to move on to HDMI.
I bought a 10” HDMI powered from the USB that I like pretty well but I haven’t actually driven the car yet so Caveat Emptor. i.e. I can’t speak on the visibility in sunlight or with sunglasses or even on offset angle although I can see it well from outside the car with the door closed trying to get it to talk to my aftermarket ECU
Also, if anyone has gotten the Beavis Motorsport/Bartonek software to work on a Pi5 that would be great too. Bartonek put a ton of work into this through the years, but stopped sharing updates to the project a few years ago. Now it appears he has taken his ideas commercial and is selling his products as a professional kit. I can’t say that I blame him.
Your observation is why I moved on immediately. I do not have a problem supporting someone else’s work. My problem was ecosystem. I have a unique use case and need flexibility to ensure that I have the best chance of success.
Also, I am running mine on the latest release from DietPi. I would like to get it to boot a little faster and that’s why I’ve joined but… I really just need to get it working. Going faster will be my sidequest for now.
The display is driver free, the only thing missing is the overlay.
Yes, it’s pre-installed on RPi OS, but not on DietPi, because it’s “diet”
IDK what overlay it is using, maybe you can just use the default RPi LCD overlay. YOu could try that out, activation is possible via dietpi-config.
If that’s not working you can check the currently installed overlays:
ls /boot/firmware/overlays/
I think this one looks promising too, just try it:
/boot/firmware/overlays/vc4-kms-dsi-7inch.dtbo
If in doubt, you should ask the manufacturer which to use.
Thanks for the ideas. Just to make sure I had something that works, I installed the full version of RPi OS. I now have TunerStudio loaded and got the autostart to work. I just did a boot test, and the time it took to power up and boot into TunerStudio was 29 sec. That’s pretty good for me. I’m going to move on with the project and start designing gauges and redesigning the face plate that will hold the display.
