I’ve just reviewed the SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display with Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspberry Pi OS, and the experience was not quite as smooth as I had expected, so I’ll report some tips to save people time.
The first is the software keyboard. Matchbox keyboard used to be the go-to solution, but two years ago, my preferred keyboard became the Onboard keyboard. Sadly, it’s not working so well with the latest Raspberry Pi OS using labwc Wayland window-stacking compositor, so now Raspberry Pi recommends squeekboard. It was not installed by default, but installation is fairly easy:
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sudo apt install squeekboard |
It did not show up automatically when trying to type in a text field, maybe because I’m using a third-party touchscreen keyboard, but going to Raspberry Pi Configuration and setting On-screen Keyboard to Enabled always in the Display tab fixed that.
I was able to type a URL/web search terms in the URL field of the Firefox web browser. It can also be manually shown/hidden with the icon on the top right corner.
If you just want to use Raspberry Pi OS with a touchscreen display, then you’re done. But if your application requires multi-touch, I noticed that the WBBMTT HTML5 application to test multi-touch support would not work anymore with the Raspberry Pi OS, as none of the taps/input events were detected.
No matter how many fingers I put on the touchscreen, the WBBMTT Touch Screen Tester remained black.
That’s because “labwc is configured for touch to have mouse emulation enabled 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:
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<?xml version="1.0"?> <openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc"> <touch deviceName="ILITEK ILITEK-TP" mapToOutput="HDMI-A-1" mouseEmulation="no"/> </openbox_config> |
Time to try again.
It worked perfectly on my touchscreen display with 10-point detected and good tracking as I moved my finger across the display.
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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