How to add a touchscreen to your Raspberry Pi projects

Fitting the display is pretty easy, but the first bit is also the fiddly bit because it involves using tiny ribbon cable.

To attach the ribbon cable to the connector on the display, first find the display connector. There's a little gray plastic tab on this connector that has to be slid back to allow the ribbon cable to be fitted. Push the ribbon cable as far as it will go and then press the gray tab back into place to secure the ribbon cable.

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The ribbon cable in my kit had a blue side, and the instructions said to have this side facing toward the circuit board. Your ribbon cable might be different, so check your instructions.

Next, fit the Raspberry Pi to the board, attaching it with the four screws. 

Make sure not to overtighten these screws.

Now you'll connect the four jumper wires to the display's control board. It doesn't matter which color you connect where, but you need to know which is which because you'll need to connect them to the appropriate pin on the Raspberry Pi in a little bit.

For reference, here are the four connections on the display board, along with which pin on the Raspberry Pi they need to be connected to:

• 5V –> Pin 2 or Pin 4
• GND –> Pin 6
• SDA (data) –> Pin 3
• SCL (clock) –> Pin 5

How do you know which pin is which on the Raspberry Pi?

Looking at the Raspberry Pi board with the writing in the correct orientation, with the 40-pin connector at the top (called a GPIO, which stands for general-purpose input/output), pin 1 is on the bottom left, and pin 40 is top right.

Remember that ribbon cable you connected to the display controller? 

Now's a good time to connect the other end to the Raspberry Pi. The process is the same as for connecting it to the display controller.

Next, you can pop the whole assembly into the case. When it's in place correctly, the ports will line up with the cutouts. 

I found it took a bit of fiddling to get the display into the case properly, but everything seemed to fall into place once the screws were fitted. (Again, you do not need to overtighten these screws.)

You've added a touchscreen display to your Raspberry Pi! Fire it up and update the software, and you're ready to take your Raspberry Pi projects to the next level.