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Byron Patil photo
South Africa, Pretoria
1 Level
689 Review
73 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ Raspberry Pi 3B+ 3.5" TFT Touch Screen Kit with Case, Stylus, Heat Sink - 320x480 Resolution LCD Display for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Pi 2 Model B & Pi Model B by Byron Patil

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Works great with OpenElec XBMC

I bought a starter kit that comes with board, case, WiFi dongle, HDMI cable, 1 amp power adapter and 4GB SD card. Housing made of transparent plastic. The ones that look like they will tear or break if dropped. It's not thick and doesn't feel solid, but the board snaps into place and the top fits snugly onto the bottom half. The Wi-Fi adapter worked straight away and was able to stream 720p from an internet streaming site (and 1080p). from a local network drive). My wireless router was in the same room about 4 feet away from me. I don't know how well the wifi works when placed in a different room. - For those who think the SD card isn't 4GB - it is. There is an almost invisible imprint on a regular SD card which in bright light and possibly a magnifying glass might have a serial number with the last few characters saying 4G or 4GB. Also, the card is partitioned so Windows only sees the first 1GB partition. With the SD card in your computer, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. You will see that the SD card and all its partitions are around 3.75GB if your package came with a 4GB card. it was literally just together. Setting your preferred operating system can be a problem. The preinstalled software on the SD card is NOOBS. A menu will appear with different operating systems to choose from. Select the one you want and it will be installed in a usable form on the same SD card. When finished, the system will reboot into your chosen operating system or XBMC setup. Now to my problems: After connecting the board, case, USB adapters for WiFi and wireless keyboard, connecting HDMI and power supply, nothing happened. A red light came on on the panel, but nothing else. I went online and after some googling I found that nothing will be displayed on your TV/monitor if the operating system is not recognized. I turned off the power, took out the SD card and put it back in and the system booted into NOOBS. I decided to install RaspBMC. The installation went smoothly, the system rebooted to the XBMC screen where the entire screen glowed slightly pink. I also googled and found that the board may not be generating enough power through the HDMI connector. There is information on the internet on how to set up a configuration file to make HDMI consume more power. I could not access this file from the SD card connected to my laptop because Noobs makes this partition not browsable in Windows. Anyway, I set the SSID and WiFi password in the RaspBMC and the system started updating automatically. After shutting down and restarting, the RaspBMC died. It was unable to complete a successful reboot and mount its partition. It was useless! Close everything. Googled how to delete all partitions on an SD card from Windows command line using Diskpart function and formatted the SD card to a large 4GB FAT32 partition. I went to the OpenELEC website and downloaded and installed the OpenELEC image for Raspberry Pi. Booted into the XBMC version of OpenElec, configured Wi-Fi and other settings. Tested streaming 1080p and 720p content from a local network drive and the Internet. It works fine in the OpenElec XBMC build. The OpenElec website is more up-to-date than the link to the Raspberry Pi website. The Pi works great with the Hausbellยฎ Mini H7 2.4 GHz wireless entertainment keyboard with touchpad. This board is obviously for people with geek abilities. So -1 star for the "won't boot" issue when I first turned it on and RaspBMC died after an update. 4 stars for OpenElec which is so easy to install and great for such a cheap kit.

Pros
  • Several competitors
Cons
  • Protection