Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics and I have in my hands a beautiful 5.5 inch AMO LED screen which is fully compatible with a Raspberry Pi single board computer. So let's set it up! The Waveshare 5.5 inch AMO LED display is a great choice for a user interface for your next Pi project. It's a 5 point capacitive touch display with toughened glass and the included mounting hardware allows you to easily warm out the device. You could easily utilize the setup as a weather guide as seen in the intro or as a smart control panel to manage your IoT devices. Control for lights, air conditioning or watering systems all spring to mind and the wider viewing angles that this AMO LED screen has over an LCD variant would be beneficial when taking a quick glance at the display as you pass by.

One of the biggest issues when picking an always on display is burn in so I'm going to show you how to set up your Raspberry Pi with screen savers so you can leave your Pi running all day. Now the screen can be used in vertical or horizontal orientations. When used with a Raspberry Pi you may notice screen tearing while playing HD video or retro games in the horizontal mode but that's no problem for lower frame rate projects like weather displays or user interfaces.

On the table before me is everything you need to make this work. We have a Raspberry Pi palm sized computer, in my case a Raspberry Pi 4 model B. Naturally you're also going to want the Waveshare 5.5 inch AMO LED screen as well as the HDMI display connector, the USB touch connector, fasteners and standoffs that all come with this screen. We also have a microSD card flashed with Raspberry Pi OS, a power supply, mouse and keyboard. You're also going to want a small screwdriver like this one right here to mount everything correctly. If you're using a Raspberry Pi 3 you're going to want to use these connectors instead.

The natural next step is to get all the hardware connected up. Place the screen down onto the table and screw in the smaller standoffs into the four central holes. Then take your Raspberry Pi and rest it over the top so that the holes line up. Next, screw down the Raspberry Pi using the supplied M2.5 screws. With the Raspberry Pi then secured to the 5.5 inch AMO LED screen, let's turn our attention to the electrical connections. Press these connectors in gently, taking care not to overstress either of the boards. The connections when fully seated look like they're not fully in, so do take care not to overdo it with too much force. Also take the time to add the four extra long standoffs into the corner of the screen so that way you can rest the system skyward securely.

We're now going to take our flashed SD card which has our local network details and we're going to insert it into our Raspberry Pi. Then plug in power to the system through the USB-C port. By default this display will turn on in portrait mode. We can configure the display for landscape in the same way as if it were connected to a normal monitor. Using a mouse we're going to click on the Raspberry Pi symbol at the top left of the screen. We're going to scroll down to preferences and select screen configuration. Having done this it's going to open up the screen layout editor. From here we're going to select the configure option in the top down menu, go down, hover over screens, hover over HDMI, hover over orientation and then select your desired orientation. In my case here I'm going to select left. It will then ask you to reboot the system to lock in these changes. After selecting the reboot option, the display will be in landscape mode.

We are manually restarting the system and making changes to the config.txt file to get the best out of the screen. To access the config.txt file, open up the terminal and type in the following line: sudo nano forge/boot/config.txt. Copy the chunk of settings from the article and paste it directly into the config.txt file. Press Control X, Y and then the Enter key to save the changes. Reboot the Raspberry Pi system to make the changes present. The touch activation isn't in the right spot, so we need to open up the terminal again and copy and paste four commands one by one. If ever prompted with the "Do you want to continue" message, type "y" and press the Enter key. This will open up a new screen configuration menu for our display. Navigate with the arrow keys to the "Input Class" section, where we can change the settings for the touchscreen.

If the match is touch screen on press enter, we're going to copy and paste the following statement inside which you can find on the article page. If you've only rotated your screen to the right, you're going to want to use this one. If you've rotated your screen 180-degrees, you're going to want to use this one. Paste the following right there and indent it just like the other ones. If another touch orientation is desired, add the appropriate statement for your case. You can find all of them in the written article. With that done, save the file like before by pressing control x y and then enter. Then reboot your Raspberry Pi.

With that last reset, you can now see our touch screen is working perfectly with multi gesture control as well. Much like plasma screens of old, if you have the same image on the screen for too long, it's going to cause a burn in. By default, Raspberry Pi will blank the screen which prevents any burn ins. This is great, but it can leave you without any positive feedback that the system is up and running. The most fun way to fix this whilst showing off how beautiful this display is, is by installing xscreensaver. To do this, type and enter into your terminal the following and press Y if prompted: sudo apt install xscreensaver. Having done this, you're going to be able to find a new option in the preferences menu. This is accessible by clicking on the Raspberry Pi symbol on the top left of the screen and hovering down and it's called Screen Saver. Clicking on this is going to open up the screen saver settings. Many of these screen savers are really very pretty or just plain fun. Here is a great use case for this particular screen. I have this set up to provide me with the local weather, the date and the time all from live API data. Head down to a guide below showing you exactly how to set this up.

I recently got my hands on a really cool AMOLED screen for my Raspberry Pi. It's a 3.5 inch display with a resolution of 480x320. I was able to get it up and running in no time. I set it up so that it would boot straight into the Raspberry Pi's desktop and then I configured the settings so that it would stay lit I got so excited with this screen that I quickly whipped up a little case for it with some nice bezels and feet. This lets it be at a nicer angle for me for better viewing whilst keeping all the electronic parts safe. I used MK Chung's original design as a base and I needed some M2.5 screws to assemble it.

And there you have it - my Schmick Raspberry Pi with its beautiful AMOLED screen fully functioning, all safe in its 3D printed case. Until next time, stay cozy!