raspi-rotate

A convenient helper to set a Raspberry's touchscreen orientation.

Installation

Download or clone the repository, then:

$ cd raspi-rotate
$ sudo make install

Usage

The executable takes one argument, the desired rotation setting:

$ raspi-rotate-screen
usage: raspi-rotate-screen [rotation]
where rotation is one of:
    normal:                 no rotation
    cw, clockwise:          rotate 90° clockwise
    ccw, counter-clockwise: rotate 90° counter-clockwise
    ud:                     rotate 180°

For example,

$ sudo raspi-rotate-screen ccw
Rotation set to CCW

How it works

There are different ways to rotate a touchscreen's display (and touch input matrix) on a Raspberry.

One of them is a /boot/config.txt parameter ; either lcd_rotate (for GPIO-connected screens) or display_rotate (for HDMI-connected screens). This is inconvenient in two ways:

• It requires a reboot
• It breaks most framebuffer programs like plymouth (hence breaking splashscreens)
• It still requires Xorg configuration for the touch matrix

Another one is using a dtoverlay parameter, for some touchscreens drivers:

dtoverlay=waveshare35a,rotate=270

Drawbacks of this method are:

• It requires a reboot
• It depends on the touchscreen dtoverlay, making it less portable

The third way is to handle rotation in Xorg. This is the method raspi-rotate uses. It still has some drawbacks:

• It requires restarting Xorg
• During boot, the kernel messages are not rotated

The advantages are:

• It is still possible to use Plymouth to display splash screens (even though it requires rotated images, this is better than static)
• It is portable and should work with any touchscreen