Does anyone here have any experience with small touch screens for the Pi? In particular the Elecrow ones seem to be for sale everywhere at quite reasonable prices.
What can you actually do with the touch screen? I.e. can it interface to programs already available for the Pi or do you have to write your own progams to do anything useful?
In particular is there any media player software (e.g. Mopidy) that can work well with a touch screen?
There's roughly two kinds of displays: ones which work like a monitor (take an HDMI input, display the desktop), and those which take an SPI or similar input and are controlled by a separate library.
The first work with all the usual desktop apps, they are the same as a monitor. For touch it's usually a USB input that works much like a mouse.
The second depend on a software stack which uses the display as a secondary display, ie you have to write code to draw things on that display and read touch inputs from it. There are libraries to talk to specific displays which work from Python/etc.
Alternatively, for some secondary displays there's a driver to provide a Linux device like /dev/fb0 that programs can write to:
Which software works with a display will depend whether it uses X or whether it's designed to draw to a secondary display.
Theo
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