SunFounder has just sent us one of their 10.1-inch touchscreen display designed for single board computers (SBCs) for review. It supports the Raspberry Pi family, but not only, thanks to a flexible design that allows mounting all sorts of boards with mounting holes that fit within an 85x70mm area.
All you need is a board with HDMI output, a spare USB port for the touchscreen, and 5V USB-C input (up to 5A). So I’ll first test the SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display with a Raspberry Pi 5 (85x56mm), then a larger Radxa ROCK 5 Model B Pico-ITX SBC (100 x 72mm). Since the display can also be used as an external touchscreen monitor, I’ll also try it with my laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 and Windows 11.
SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display specifications
Key features and specifications:
- Display Type – IPS LCD
- Resolution – 1280×800 (16:10 aspect ratio)
- Touchscreen – 10-point capacitive
- Viewing angle – 178°
- Speakers – 2x 2W/8Ω
- Input interfaces – HDMI (video+audio) and USB Type-A (touchscreen)
- Power Supply
- Input – DC 12V/5A
- Output – 5.1V/5A via USB-C for Raspberry Pi 5
- Dimensions – 25.6 x 16.8 x 3.8 cm (height with standoffs)
- Weight – 728 grams fully assembled with Raspberry Pi 5 and active cooler
The table below can serve as a quick guide to find out if your board is fully supported.
If you don’t need to mount and/or power the board/device through the display, then all you need is a device with HDMI output and a USB port. But if you want to mount the board on the display and power it through its USB-C port, there are mechanical and power constraints, meaning it won’t be perfectly compatible with all boards.
Unboxing
I received the display in a retail package that appears to have suffered a bit during transport, but the important part is that I received the display and accessories in good condition.
In the package, we’ll find the touchscreen display test, a 12V/5A (100-240V AC) power adapter, an operation manual, USB-C and mini HDMI cables, a USB touchscreen cable, some standoffs of different heights, a few screws, black stickers, a pair of speakers, two Allen keys, a small screwdriver, and an acrylic plate to cover the SBC.
On the bottom side of the display, we’ll find the RM101 control board, three threads for mounting the board, and a touchscreen module.
The RM101_V3.1 board is based on a RealTek RTD2513A flat panel display controller. On the left side, we’ll find five buttons for Power, Menu, -, +, and Back, the top right connector is for the pair of speakers, and three connector can be found on the bottom side with a 12V DC jack, an HDMI input port, and USB-C port for power. The touchscreen module is based on ILITEK ILI2511 capacitive touch sensor controller, and features two USB connectors, but only the 1.25mm pitch one on the right is used in this kit. The ILI2511 chip supports USB, I2C, and UART, but the user manual says the small 0.5mm pitch connector also carries USB signal. If I2C or UART signals were exposed, we would be able to save a USB port on compatible boards, although I reckon it would be a bit less user-friendly than USB.
SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display assembly with Raspberry Pi 5
Let’s get started with the review and mount a Raspberry Pi 5 to the back of SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display. I’ll assume Raspberry Pi OS on the board and the Pi 5 is up and running.
The three mounting threads have been arranged and secured to match the Raspberry Pi board’s mounting holes at the factory. So I did not need to use the Allen key to adjust these. I just placed the Raspberry Pi on top, and tightened three 18mm standoffs to keep it in place.
The next step is to install the pair of speakers. I slid the wires under the display control board, and connected the cable to the speaker connector, making sure the black wire is on the left. I then peeled the stick on the bottom of the speakers to stick them on the left and right sides on the metal bar on the bottom. I initially placed them vertically centered, but eventually realized the one on the left would block the HDMI cable. So I moved both to align with the bottom of the metal bar. With hindsight, I’d recommend moving the left speaker further to the left so it’s not covered by the HDMI cable. That’s unless you plan to use a 3D printed stand with the display (see below). I also added tape to keep the wires in position as instructed in the user manual.
We can now add the cables. First connect the HDMI to micro HDMI cable between the control board and the Pi 5, and do the same for the USB-C cable for power. Finally, connect the USB-C to touchscreen cable between the left connector on the touch module and one of the USB Type-A ports on the Raspberry Pi board. Add some tape to secure the wires close to the touch module, and we’re done.
If I connect the power supply from the display, my Raspberry Pi 5 boots into Raspberry Pi OS and I can use the touchscreen display normally.
However, the display is placed horizontally on the table, which may be fine for some applications, but not so much for others. That’s why SunFounder also provided a 3D file to let users print their own stand. I printed two, one for the left side, and the other for the right side using a Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro 3D printer.
The installation is not difficult. You just need to remove the RM101 control board, slide one of the stands on the two standoffs on the left, before reinstalling the control board. Then insert the other stand on the right. That’s it, and it looks fairly good. You may need to bend the cables in the right position, or they may serve as a third leg…
The latest version of the wiki also has a full 3D printed case for the display. I haven’t tried it myself, but here’s what it looks like.
Another trick is to simply add two standoffs on the back side of the display.
Review of SunFounder 10.1-inch RPi touchscreen display with Raspberry Pi 5
Now that the system is up and running, we can test it in more detail. You’ll probably need a software keyboard. I used to like Matchbox, but a couple of years ago I changed to the Onboard keyboard when reviewing the BTT Pad 7 touchscreen display, since Matchbox did not work well anymore.
It can be installed with:
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sudo apt install onboard at-spi2-core |
But it’s not working well in the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, as I can’t type text in Firefox with it. The focus window will become the Onboard keyboard each time I press a key, so even if I select the URL field, it won’t work.
The last Raspberry Pi OS is supposed to use Squeekboard. It was not installed on my image, so I manually installed it as follows:
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sudo apt install squeekboard |
A keyboard icon should show on the top right corner of the display, but it was not there for me. It’s also supposed to show up, when a text field is selected, but again no luck. I finally went to Raspberry Pi Configuration, and changed “On-screen Keyboard” to “Enabled always” in the Display section.
I finally got a software keyboard that worked properly!
Let’s now test multi-touch in Linux with WBBMTT as I usually do in such reviews..
But it’s not working in either Firefox or Chrome, all I get is a black screen, and the mouse pointer simply follows the last finger to touch the display.
That’s because “labwc is configured for touch to have mouse emulation enabled in order to make a number of things work, however it disables multi-touch”. We can indeed see mouse emulation is enabled in ~/.config/labwc/rc.xml:
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pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat ~/.config/labwc/rc.xml <?xml version="1.0"?> <openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc"> <touch deviceName="ILITEK ILITEK-TP" mapToOutput="HDMI-A-1" mouseEmulation="yes"/> </openbox_config> |
Let’s edit the file to set mouse emulation to no, and try again.
Success! Everything was a bit harder than expected. The tracking of all 10 points works pretty well, as you can see in the short video below.
The final test with the Raspberry Pi 5 was to watch a YouTube video to evaluate the quality of the speakers. Those are clearly not for audiophiles (i.e. I would not use it as a media player), but good enough, and better than the speakers used with the Raspberry Pi Monitor. Here’s a short video with the Thai national anthem since I guess I won’t get a copyright strike with that one… That’s with volume maxed out on the display and Raspberry Pi OS.
A Quick look at the OSD
The display has an OSD used for configuration. Most people will probably not use it, but it can be useful to adjust settings like brightness, so let’s go through each item of the main menu. Press menu on the control board to bring up the menu, then use the plus and minus button to navigate, Menu as a “OK” button, and the Back button to go back to the previous selection.
The first menu is “Picture” used to adjust backlight, brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc…
We then have the Display menu to auto adjust the display, change the H and V position, modify the clock, etc…
The Color menu lets the user change color temperature, gamma, and other settings.
The “Advance” menu has two options “DDCCI” and “Ultra Vivid”.
The “Input” model is useless for this model since there’s only one HDMI input, but it’s probably the default firmware.
Users can adjust the volume or mute in the Audio menu. There’s also a “Stand Along” feature, which I thought would play some music, but it doesn’t do anything when I turn it on…
The Other menu is useful to factory reset the display, set the OSD menu timeout, and adjust the OSD vertical and horizontal positions.
The Information section shows we have an HDMI display with 1280×800 resolution, 60 Hz refresh rate, and DHCP disabled.
Finally, there’s a Factory menu that brings a window on the top left corner with technical data.
ROCK 5B with SunFounder 10.1-inch RPI Touchscreen Display
The SunFounder 10.1-inch RPi touchscreen display works well with the Raspberry Pi 5, but how does it perform with another SBC? Let’s try it with the ROCK 5B Pico-ITX SBC from Radxa.
The installation procedure is similar to the one for the Raspberry Pi 5. Note that it can be mounted on the display because it has mounting holes for Raspberry Pi HATs, and other Pico-ITX boards might be too big to be mounted on the display. One difference is that the board features full-size HDMI ports instead of micro HDMI connectors, so we can’t use the short cable provided with the kit, and instead a standard HDMI cable is needed. I don’t own a short one, so I used a one-meter cable, and the 3D printed stands do help a little with cable management.
When I powered the display, it did not seem to work. After closer inspection, I noticed the ROCK 5B would just boot loop with the green LED turning on for a while, then off for a second or so in an infinite cycle.
I thought it might be a power issue, so I connected an official 5V/5A Raspberry Pi power adapter, and the board seemed to boot properly, but the screen remained black. I could SSH to the board and tried to update the Debian images, but apt dist-upgrade had nothing new. I also noticed the Radxa wiki for that board was full of pages with 404 errors.
So I downloaded the Armbian 25.2.2 Noble Gnome image to get something more up-to-date and flashed it to a microSD card. I could boot the board, but again it was in a boot loop even though I used the same Raspberry Pi USB PD power supply. It’s a known issue explained on Armbian download page:
PD is broken for the 5B model (background) on most revisions that are in the wild and is causing boot loop. Workaround is to use a stupid / fixed 5-24 volts USB-C power supply.
So I took a 20V power supply (the Radxa board does support up to 20V) from the Fogwise Airbox, and this time it booted fine, but again the SunFounder display remained black. I spent close to two hours trying to find a solution, reading about EDID configuration, and so on. Connecting an HDMI display to the second HDMI port worked.
When I logged into the board, only one display was detected:
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jaufranc@rock-5b:~$ xrandr Screen 0: minimum 16 x 16, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767 HDMI-1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 480mm x 270mm 1920x1080 59.96*+ 1440x1080 59.99 1400x1050 59.98 1280x1024 59.89 1280x960 59.94 1152x864 59.96 1024x768 59.92 800x600 59.86 640x480 59.38 320x240 59.52 1680x1050 59.95 1440x900 59.89 1280x800 59.81 1152x720 59.97 960x600 59.63 928x580 59.88 800x500 59.50 768x480 59.90 720x480 59.71 640x400 59.95 320x200 58.96 1600x900 59.95 1368x768 59.88 1280x720 59.86 1024x576 59.90 864x486 59.92 720x400 59.55 640x350 59.77 |
I also noticed some HDMI related errors in dmesg:
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bus_width:16a8c8 rate:1485000 [ 1067.607096] rockchip-hdptx-phy-hdmi fed60000.hdmiphy: hdptx phy pll locked! [ 1067.607100] rockchip-vop2 fdd90000.vop: [drm:vop2_crtc_atomic_enable] set dclk_vop0 to 148500000, get 148500000 [ 1067.607129] dwhdmi-rockchip fde80000.hdmi: final tmdsclk = 148500000 [ 1067.607158] dwhdmi-rockchip fde80000.hdmi: don't use dsc mode [ 1067.607161] dwhdmi-rockchip fde80000.hdmi: dw hdmi qp use tmds mode [ 1067.607165] rockchip-hdptx-phy-hdmi fed60000.hdmiphy: bus_width:0x16a8c8,bit_rate:1485000 |
I decided to check if I could change some settings in the OSD… and pressed the Menu key… or was it the Power key…. and this happened:
Oops. That’s embarrassing. Most of the issues I had were because the display was turned off. When the Raspberry Pi 5 is connected, the display will automatically be powered when the system boots, but somehow with the ROCK 5B I had to manually turn it on. The touchscreen function also works fine.
At this point, I turned off the board, disconnected the 20V power supply, and connected the USB-C port of the ROCK 5B to the USB-C port of the RM101 control board, and applied power again. This time it worked, and that means the SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display is fully compatible with the ROCK 5B as long as you run Armbian, which works with a fixed power supply, while the Debian image I initially used only works with USB PD power supplies. When using the display’s power supply, as opposed to a separate power supply to power the board, I don’t need to press the power button to turn it on. It’s automatically on as the board boots…
Multitouch works, but not perfectly. The screenshot above was only possible through teamwork as it only works for a fraction of a second. That’s because 3 touches is also a Gnome gesture to switch between workspaces. There are Gnome extensions to disable gestures, but none of the ones I tested would work or install properly. Multitouch works fine up to two fingers with Gnome without any tweaks, and it’s good enough if you’re going to use it as a web terminal for example. However, if you need multitouch over 2 points using a different desktop environment might help.
When I first played a YouTube video there was no audio whatsoever. But that one was an easy fix. I just had to change the Output Device to “Analog Output – HDMI1 Audio” in the Sound settings, and after that, it worked just as well as in Raspberry Pi OS.
Finally, I tried to find a suitable software keyboard. Onboard had the same behavior as in Raspberry Pi OS, and squeekboard was not available for installation with apt. So I tried the matchbox-keyboard, and it did work OK.
The SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display does reasonably work with the ROCK 5B SBC, but it did require some efforts, and more work than I would have expected…
Using the SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display as an external display with Ubuntu or Windows
I connected the SunFounder display to the HDMI input and one of the USB ports to my laptop running Windows 11, and everything worked out of the box, including 10-point touchscreen and speakers.
I tried the same with Ubuntu 24.04, and while the display was properly detected, the touchscreen was assigned to the wrong display.
In other words, tapping the touchscreen will register input events on the laptop’s built-in display. But that’s not my first rodeo, I’m a pro (so I thought), and I’ll just use the same instructions as I used in the CrowVi review to map the touchscreen and the display with xinput.
It started fine as I could identify the SunFounder display as HDMI-1:
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xrandr ... HDMI-1 connected 1280x800+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1280x800 59.81*+ 1024x768 59.92 800x600 59.86 640x480 59.38 320x240 59.52 1152x720 59.75 960x600 59.63 928x580 59.88 800x500 59.50 768x480 59.90 720x480 59.71 640x400 59.95 320x200 58.96 1280x720 59.86 1024x576 59.90 864x486 59.92 720x400 59.55 640x350 59.77 |
But it quickly went south:
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jaufranc@CNX-LAPTOP-5:~$ xinput --list WARNING: running xinput against an Xwayland server. See the xinput man page for details. ⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ⎜ ↳ xwayland-pointer:15 id=6 [slave pointer (2)] ⎜ ↳ xwayland-relative-pointer:15 id=7 [slave pointer (2)] ⎜ ↳ xwayland-pointer-gestures:15 id=8 [slave pointer (2)] ⎜ ↳ xwayland-touch:15 id=10 [slave pointer (2)] ⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)] ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)] ↳ xwayland-keyboard:15 id=9 [slave keyboard (3)] |
Most recent Linux operating systems have now switched to Wayland, which is not supported by xinput. We can still list devices with libinput. Since the output is quite verbose, I filtered the results:
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$ sudo libinput list-devices | grep Device Device: Power Button Device: Video Bus Device: Lid Switch Device: Power Button Device: Logitech Wireless Keyboard PID:4023 Device: Logitech Wireless Mouse Device: ILITEK ILITEK-TP Device: ILITEK ILITEK-TP Mouse Device: ASUE1306:00 04F3:3284 Mouse Device: ASUE1306:00 04F3:3284 Touchpad Device: Asus WMI hotkeys Device: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard |
What we are looking for are ILITEK devices:
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sudo libinput --list-devices: Device: ILITEK ILITEK-TP Kernel: /dev/input/event10 Group: 7 Seat: seat0, default Size: 309x174mm Capabilities: touch Tap-to-click: n/a Tap-and-drag: n/a Tap drag lock: n/a Left-handed: n/a Nat.scrolling: n/a Middle emulation: n/a Calibration: identity matrix Scroll methods: none Click methods: none Disable-w-typing: n/a Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a Accel profiles: n/a Rotation: 0.0 Device: ILITEK ILITEK-TP Mouse Kernel: /dev/input/event16 Group: 7 Seat: seat0, default Size: 309x174mm Capabilities: pointer Tap-to-click: n/a Tap-and-drag: n/a Tap drag lock: n/a Left-handed: disabled Nat.scrolling: disabled Middle emulation: disabled Calibration: identity matrix Scroll methods: none Click methods: none Disable-w-typing: n/a Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a Accel profiles: n/a Rotation: 0.0 |
So we have all the data we need, but I had to stop there, but I learned there’s no equivalent to xinput mapping with libinput. I tried various methods like libinput device quirks, or setting the touchscreen display as the primary display, but nothing worked. A method that would work is to switch to X11 at least until better touchscreen support is implemented in Wayland. Alternatively, switching to the Sway Wayland compositor might be another option, but all that is out of the scope of this review.
Conclusion
The SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display offers a convenient way to connect all sorts of single board computers from the Raspberry Pi 5 up to larger boards like the ROCK 5B Pico-ITX SBC, or smaller ones like the Raspberry Pi Zero. The hardware itself works as expected with 1280×60 resolution, 60 Hz refresh rate, 10-point touchscreen, and built-in speakers. The main downside here is the speakers’ quality that could be a bit better.
The most challenging part of the review was getting the OS to work fully with the touchscreen display. Only Windows 11 worked out of the box without modifications for 10-point multitouch support. That’s because most Linux distributions support touch gestures or mouse emulation. For example, I had to disable mouse emulation on Raspberry Pi OS to complete the multi-touch test. I had a similar problem on Ubuntu, as Gnome would interpret three-finger taps as a gesture to change workspace, but I could not find a workaround. Using a different desktop environment might help. Out of the two SBC tested, the Raspberry Pi 5 was the easiest to use despite the small tweaks I had to make. The Radxa ROCK5 Model B was more complicated due to a quirk with USB PD hardware that requires an OS image that supports fixed voltage instead of USB-C… Eventually, I managed to have both working with the SunFounder touchscreen display, but it took a lot more effort than I had initially expected.
I’d like to thank SunFounder for sending the latest version of the 10.1-inch Touchscreen Display for SBCs. Note that there are also older models with almost the same name, but some have 5-point, and others still support 10-point, but with different features (e.g. speakers are not included). The model reviewed here can be purchased for $149.99 on the SunFounder website with all accessories.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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