Topics covered in the PiScreeen Quick Start Guide;
- Installation Instructions.
- Connecting directly to the GPIO pins.
- PiScreen Backlight
- PiScreen with an External Keyboard or Mouse
- Playing a Video on PiScreen
- Display Images on PiScreen
Installation Instructions
These can be found here
Connecting directly to the GPIO pins.
First, place the standoffs in the mounting holes of the Raspberry Pi, and tighten with nylon nuts.
Connect PiScreen to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi.
PiScreen can also be connected to Raspberry Pi B+ GPIO pins.


PiScreen Backlight
The PiScreen back light can between switch on and off with the hardware switch or within software. For the software feature to work the hardware switch should be in the on position.
In Software;
# Turn off backlight
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/*/bl_power
# Turn on backlight
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/*/bl_power
In Hardware;
The below image has the position of the switch highlighted.
PiScreen with an External Keyboard or Mouse
PiScreen will also work with with a keyboard and mouse. If you are having trouble accessing some windows, plug a keyboard or mouse into the USB port of your Raspberry Pi. No reboot necessary.
Playing a Video on PiScreen
First, you will need to install a video player that is able to play videos on a framebuffer.
mplayer takes a lot of different options when playing a video. The most important one is -vo fbdev2:/dev/fb1, this forces the video to be played on PiScreen.
Videos that are already scaled to 320x480 play best as the Pi struggles to convert on the fly.
Display Images on PiScreen
FBI can be used to display images on PiScreen.
Then to display an image on PiScreen