MVT-Pi

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi 5 (at least 4GB RAM)
• SD Card (at least 128 GB)
• 320×480 3.5 inch touchscreen display

Installation

Connect the touchscreen display

• Connect the touchscreeen display to Raspberry Pi via GPIO ports as depicted.

Flash SD Card

• Use Raspberry Pi Imager to flash 64-bit Raspbian OS Desktop based on Debian Bookworm 12
• Configure WiFi and SSH public key authentication before flashing.
• NOTE: This is not the latest version based on Debian Trixie 13
• The display should be completely white when the Raspberry Pi turns on. This is expected.

Configure the touchscreen display

• Run sudo raspi-config and change the following settings.

Advanced    -> Change Wayland to X11
Interface   -> Enable SPI

• Upgrade system packages

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

• Edit /boot/firmware/config.txt.

Comment out the line containing dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d. The file should look something like this:

...
# Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver
# dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
max_framebuffers=2
...

Continue editing /boot/firmware/config.txt. Under [all] add the following line:

dtoverlay=piscreen,speed=18000000,drm

• Reboot the Raspberry Pi 5

sudo reboot now

Upon restarting, the display should work but touch may not be callibrated.

Set MVT_USER and MVT_IP

• Move .env.sample to .env. Set MVT_USER to a user with super admin privilege and MVT_IP to the IP address of the Raspberry Pi.

Run install script

• Run the install script. It will connect to the Raspberry Pi via SSH to install all necessary packages. It will also calibrate the touchscreen.

bash install.sh