My current rower setup with a 7 inch Touchscreen with a Raspberry Pi case

[laberning]

This is the setup that I currently use on a Sportstech WRX700 rowing machine:

I was looking for a touchscreen that is easy to read while rowing. So it needed a reasonable size and a good viewing angle stability. It should host the Raspberry Pi and have a nice pixel density.

It took me some time to find a display that matched that list, but now I'm quite happy with the UPERFECT Raspberry Pi 7 inch Touchscreen Monitor.

It is a 7" IPS touchscreen with a resolution of 1024x600 which gives a nice PPI (around 170).

I plugged a Raspberry Pi 3 B in there. The device comes with some tiny HDMI and USB adapters, so the whole cabling stays inside the device and the raspberry gets powered by the screen.

There are also some speakers in the case, but I haven't used those so far. If I listen to music or movies while rowing I prefer Bluetooth headphones. But maybe the speakers can become handy one day if we add training timers and start playing notification sounds...

The case has some VESA holes on the back so I used those to attach the screen in portrait orientation to the rower.

To rotate the display to portrait mode and use it's native resolution, required some adjustments in /boot/config.txt:

# rotate the screen to portrait orientation (only with legacy raspberry display driver)
display_rotate=1
# set the native resolution to 1024x600@60hz
hdmi_cvt=1024 600 60 3 0 0 0
# 2 means DMT (Display Monitor Timings)
hdmi_group=2
#  87 means use the resolution set before
hdmi_mode=87
# 2 selects the normal HDMI mode
hdmi_drive=2

With Raspberry Pi Bullseye the new KMS display driver is the default driver and rotating the screen works a bit differently.

So either one can switch back to the legacy driver by commenting out the dtoverlay:

in /boot/config.txt:

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

But I think a better way is to use the new display driver, rotating the screen needs a bit more configuration though:

in /boot/config.txt set the display mode:

# set the native resolution to 1024x600@60hz
hdmi_cvt=1024 600 60 3 0 0 0
# 2 means DMT (Display Monitor Timings)
hdmi_group=2
#  87 means use the resolution set before
hdmi_mode=87
# 2 selects the normal HDMI mode
hdmi_drive=2

to rotate the xserver session, in /opt/openrowingmonitor/install/webbrowserkiosk.sh add:

xrandr --orientation right

to rotate the boot terminal, in /boot/cmdline.txt prepend the existing command with (all has to be on one line):

fbcon=rotate:1 

[JaapvanEkris]

That looks like an extremely cool setup!

[carlito1979]

Very cool setup. I've ordered a 3.5 inch screen and case for my own setup. I may end up deciding that this size is too small so it's good to know this option exists and isn't too expensive!

One question - have you considered running this via a battery/power bank? My rower is usually in the garage but sometimes I like to use it outside. I'd rather like to avoid having to run a power cable to where-ever the rower is located if I could

[laberning]

This should be possible - the device uses a 12V DC power adapter to power the screen and Raspi.

[felipedalton]

I've purchased the same touchscreen monitor (it's really good!) but for some reason the touch USB is not working with my Pi 3 (not recognized via USB though the manufacturer says it requires no drivers) - I was wondering if we can change the tiles using the cli via ssh? I've been trying with a USB mouse but without a pointer it's almost impossible to hit the checkboxes correctly :(

[Abasz]

Unfortunately no. Because the tiles are saved in the browser local storage and not into settings. But you can try adding a keyboard, hit f12 for dev tools and where you can try to edit local storage there directly.

this is the strcture of the settings:

 {
      dashboardMetrics: ['distance', 'timer', 'pace', 'power', 'stkRate', 'totalStk', 'calories', 'actions'],
      showIcons: true,
      maxNumberOfTiles: 8
    }

you need to enter the following command in the devtools:

localStorage.setItem("dashboardMetrics", JSON.stringify(['distance', 'timer', 'pace', 'power', 'stkRate', 'totalStk', 'calories', 'actions']))

Where of course the element of the arrays are the tiles

https://github.com/JaapvanEkris/openrowingmonitor/blob/main/app/client/store/dashboardMetrics.js

Here you can find the name of the tiles (the property name).