Windows 10 iot core touch screen

Hi,

I was looking for a framebuffer GUI language to use on the Pi, and came across a youtube video, which explained that you can run Windows IOT on the PI, and deploy VB.NET applications, that run on the Pi’s screen, which is perfect for that I want to do.

The current release of flash.ffu (Windows IOT Core) only supports HDMI output, but version 10.10.10556.0 (insider preview) does output natively to the DSI interface (official 7″ screen / Embest bridge), which is great, however their is still no touch support in this version. I have scoured many forums, and all suggest that development of IOT is likely to be very slow as IOT is completely free, and therefore development on it is going to be slow, but forums were suggesting tha the RPI guys over in Cambridge are working on the development.

How long before a new version of IOT is released that supports the Official 7″ touch screen, with full touch capabilities?

Windows IOT is maybe one release away from ticking all the boxes for me.

Oracle have pulled the plug on JavaFX which was my next best choice, and it seems that their is only one version of JavaFX that is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2, and the «touch» bit of the touchscreen doesn’t work with it.

Thanks

Alan

alantrundle wrote:Hi,

I was looking for a framebuffer GUI language to use on the Pi, and came across a youtube video, which explained that you can run Windows IOT on the PI, and deploy VB.NET applications, that run on the Pi’s screen, which is perfect for that I want to do.

The current release of flash.ffu (Windows IOT Core) only supports HDMI output, but version 10.10.10556.0 (insider preview) does output natively to the DSI interface (official 7″ screen / Embest bridge), which is great, however their is still no touch support in this version. I have scoured many forums, and all suggest that development of IOT is likely to be very slow as IOT is completely free, and therefore development on it is going to be slow, but forums were suggesting tha the RPI guys over in Cambridge are working on the development.

How long before a new version of IOT is released that supports the Official 7″ touch screen, with full touch capabilities?

Windows IOT is maybe one release away from ticking all the boxes for me.

Oracle have pulled the plug on JavaFX which was my next best choice, and it seems that their is only one version of JavaFX that is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2, and the «touch» bit of the touchscreen doesn’t work with it.

Thanks

Alan

Windows 10 IoT Core is a Microsoft Developed Product and as yet the MSDN Forum has given no time scale for Touch Support on the RPF Screen, but Microsoft do offer an alternative supported screen. The RPF only supply the means for Microsoft to create a driver and are not involved in development.

Also it is not like Linux and therefore not open-source, it has the normal Microsoft Licensing constraints.

Therefore I can appreciate your frustrations but no good expecting the Raspberry Pi Foundation or the open-source community to fix issues, it is totally down to Microsoft to step up and offer a good product.

https://dev.windows.com/en-us/iot

Hi,

Thanks for the quick update on the current state of play. I don’t suppose you have an email address/ contact path for the guys over at Microsoft do you?

The forum is a mess.

I am happy to chase the RPF touchscreen development as the VB.NET is an attractive development platform, and the lack of touch is holding up my development.

Thanks

Alan

The only touch screen that is working on IoT at present is http://www.chalk-elec.com/?page_id=1280 … ry=3094861

Support for other touch screens (including the official one) is planned, but getting an answer from Microsoft as to when is tricky.

It is somewhat odd that people are complaining that support for hardware peripherals is poor on IoT when the hardware manufacturers themselves are not stepping up to provide that support (as they should).

Good manufactures are doing it c.f. (http://www.nxp.com/documents/applicatio … N11767.pdf) but others are WAY behind.

viewtopic.php?f=105&t=120087&p=813753&h … en#p813753

Microsoft provides Win10IoT. MS did all the driver work to get that going, not the Foundation. I Repeat — the Foundation did not do ANY driver work on the WIn10IoT release- it was ALL done by Microsoft.

fruitoftheloom wrote:Why should the Foundation produce a driver for an OS they don’t supply or support, that they know nothing about (all their devs are Linux — they are simply not going to contract in someone to do the job — they would NEVER make the money back), and that is a tiny part of the market (at the moment). What they have done is update the firmware to support the new screen. MS will need to take that new firmware, and write a driver to use the new bits of it to support the touchscreen. Not a huge job I expect, but certainly one better done by Microsoft than any one else. After all, they are the ones who wanted to get their OS on the Pi, they shouldn’t expect others to do that job for them.[/i]

Typical ‘throw it over the wall’ response from a ‘we don’t want no stinking Windows on our Pi’ point of view.

Does the foundation make money from the sale of the Screen and the Pi itself on IoT. Yes. Does it want to contribute beyond a ‘throw it over the wall’ level. According to you, No. Great.

Never mind, it will all be done for you soon. Free and without effort on your part.

ricl wrote:

fruitoftheloom wrote:Why should the Foundation produce a driver for an OS they don’t supply or support, that they know nothing about (all their devs are Linux — they are simply not going to contract in someone to do the job — they would NEVER make the money back), and that is a tiny part of the market (at the moment). What they have done is update the firmware to support the new screen. MS will need to take that new firmware, and write a driver to use the new bits of it to support the touchscreen. Not a huge job I expect, but certainly one better done by Microsoft than any one else. After all, they are the ones who wanted to get their OS on the Pi, they shouldn’t expect others to do that job for them.[/i]

Typical ‘throw it over the wall’ response from a ‘we don’t want no stinking Windows on our Pi’ point of view.

Does the foundation make money from the sale of the Screen and the Pi itself on IoT. Yes. Does it want to contribute beyond a ‘throw it over the wall’ level. According to you, No. Great.

Never mind, it will all be done for you soon. Free and without effort on your part.

Please Ricl give it a rest, I appreciate the posts you have made in the W10 IoT Forum but can we not have another whinge, it is what it is

kusti8 wrote:It’s not a ‘no Windows’ response, it’s viewing it from a business standpoint. The Foundation has one official OS where they commit all their effort into. Remember, they don’t have many people. Microsoft created the OS and all of the support. The Foundation had nothing to do with that. Why should the Foundation pour resources into Windows when they already have their own OS to take care of that is designed for educations. Windows is not. They encourage people to develop, but they are small and it makes no sense to support something that is not acceptable for their end goals, teaching kids to program.

Would you care to estimate the amount of money made by the Foundation from the sales of Windows 10 Core IoT computers and screens?

Do you consider that income stream to be of value to the Foundation? They say it is.

fruitoftheloom wrote:Please Ricl give it a rest, I appreciate the posts you have made in the W10 IoT Forum but can we not have another whinge, it is what it is

Sure. As soon as you stop running down MS at every step.

IoT is a powerful little OS, not just a developers platform.

ricl wrote:

fruitoftheloom wrote:Please Ricl give it a rest, I appreciate the posts you have made in the W10 IoT Forum but can we not have another whinge, it is what it is

Sure. As soon as you stop running down MS at every step.

I resent that comment big time it is not factually correct

Hi,

I agree with Ricl on the powerful OS bit, and it certaintly saves messing around with QT cross-compiling etc, which just at moment is all we have to develop with on the Pi, well anything with a professional Non X framebuffer GUI. Sure Python is OK, but I’m not at all impressed with it’s widget’s, and nor can you drop objects onto a from like you can with JavaFX or Java Swing.

The thing about Java Swing is that you have to run an X server which is resource hungry, and you have to put up with the application running in a window.

JavaFX is ultra cool as it outputs to a framebuffer, so it eliminates the need to run an X server, however Oracle have pulled the plug on development og JavaFX on the ARM platform, and guess what the bloody eGalax touchscreen doesn’t work with it.

I am a fan of Visual Studio. It’s a very slick professional object orientated IDE, and very well supported. It’s my opinion that Microsoft will be the chosen O/S on the Pi, and linux will slowly fade away into the distance.

This is my opinion on the matter

Alan

fruitoftheloom wrote:

ricl wrote:

fruitoftheloom wrote:Please Ricl give it a rest, I appreciate the posts you have made in the W10 IoT Forum but can we not have another whinge, it is what it is

Sure. As soon as you stop running down MS at every step.

I resent that comment big time it is not factually correct

«Windows 10 and Ubuntu Core are for Developers and are NOT a full Operating System»

Hi,

On the issue of a development OS.

Well I purchased the raspberry pi 2 and official 7″ touchscreen for the sole purpose of development. The Pi is a nice piece of kit, but it’s limited as all ARM products are, and in truth beyond playing H264 video’s, listening to music there’s not much more you can do with one, except that it’s perfect for interfacing to micro-controllers like the Arduino which provides far more IO flexibility, to to be honest proper saves the day, as non real-time operating systems like linux/ windows are laggy when operating external SPI/I2C chips etc.

For those of you that like to play with the GPIO, I2C and SPI interfaces then I think the up and coming Microsoft IOT platform is the best one to choose. I am pretty sure that you could code an app, hopefully with touch ability soon to play/ stream video content to the DSI or HDMI port, so in truth it ticks many many boxes for making the most of a limited product.

That’s hope that Microsoft get the eGalax touch screen drivers sorted before the end of the year

Regards

Alan

Quick reminder to people.

Keep it polite.

As to the rest, there is no ‘throw it over the wall’ ‘We don’t want no stinking windows’ (BTW, Fruit quoted an old post of mine). The Foundation is more than happy for anyone to develop their OS on the Raspberry Pi, and where they have expertise and staff and time, will help (they helped MS albeit in a limited way with the IoT port, not with software, just advice).

What they won’t do is specifically write drivers for an OS they don’t know for hardware that was developed for the main OS for the Pi (Linux). That is not cost effective, and should be done by the people who write the OS and have the staff and expertise to do it. Why? Because the amount of money the Foundation make from these other OS is minimal. I doubt they have made more than $50k on the sales of Pi for Win IoT (assuming $2 per Pi goes to the Foundation [made up figure], 25k sold specifically for WinIoT, compared with 6.5M sold for Linux) . From that 50k there is the educational outreach to pay for, the office costs (admin, engineers etc), tax implications. So lets say $15k at most remains to spend on actual engineering time. That does not equate to getting a contractor in for one driver. Put another way, 7.5K Pi’s would need to be sold specifically using the touchscreen for WinIot before any profit is made whatsoever. You usually need to make about 30% profit to run the rest of the business, so thats about 10k Pi’s. I’m not seeing that as cost effective, when the engineering time can be spent elsewhere on MUCH larger markets.

It all down to cost and where the Foundation wants to spend it’s money. It nothing to do with wanting or not wanting Windows.

alantrundle wrote:Hi,

On the issue of a development OS.

Well I purchased the raspberry pi 2 and official 7″ touchscreen for the sole purpose of development. The Pi is a nice piece of kit, but it’s limited as all ARM products are, and in truth beyond playing H264 video’s, listening to music there’s not much more you can do with one, except that it’s perfect for interfacing to micro-controllers like the Arduino which provides far more IO flexibility, to to be honest proper saves the day, as non real-time operating systems like linux/ windows are laggy when operating external SPI/I2C chips etc.

For those of you that like to play with the GPIO, I2C and SPI interfaces then I think the up and coming Microsoft IOT platform is the best one to choose. I am pretty sure that you could code an app, hopefully with touch ability soon to play/ stream video content to the DSI or HDMI port, so in truth it ticks many many boxes for making the most of a limited product.

That’s hope that Microsoft get the eGalax touch screen drivers sorted before the end of the year

Regards

Alan

You’ve missed a few things the Pi does. H264 encode with the camera is a very popular use case. Robot control is another popular usecase, arcade emulation is another popular use case. There are many more.

As for laggy realtime, there are thousands of ‘real time’ products out there using Linux as the base OS. It all depends on how real time you want to be. My Amazon Fire stick is great. Works in real time. Yet uses Linux (and the same GPU as the Pi).

I’m also rather intrigued as to why you think all ARM devices are limited? Given they power the vast majority of the worlds computing devices, that seems an odd statement to make. Why is an ARM device more limited than the much less used, for example, MIPS device, or X86?

jamesh wrote:Quick reminder to people.

Keep it polite.

As to the rest, there is no ‘throw it over the wall’ ‘We don’t want no stinking windows’ (BTW, Fruit quoted an old post of mine). The Foundation is more than happy for anyone to develop their OS on the Raspberry Pi, and where they have expertise and staff and time, will help (they helped MS albeit in a limited way with the IoT port, not with software, just advice).

What they won’t do is specifically write drivers for an OS they don’t know for hardware that was developed for the main OS for the Pi (Linux). That is not cost effective, and should be done by the people who write the OS and have the staff and expertise to do it. Why? Because the amount of money the Foundation make from these other OS is minimal. I doubt they have made more than $50k on the sales of Pi for Win IoT (assuming $2 per Pi goes to the Foundation [made up figure], 25k sold specifically for WinIoT, compared with 6.5M sold for Linux) . From that 50k there is the educational outreach to pay for, the office costs (admin, engineers etc), tax implications. So lets say $15k at most remains to spend on actual engineering time. That does not equate to getting a contractor in for one driver. Put another way, 7.5K Pi’s would need to be sold specifically using the touchscreen for WinIot before any profit is made whatsoever. You usually need to make about 30% profit to run the rest of the business, so thats about 10k Pi’s. I’m not seeing that as cost effective, when the engineering time can be spent elsewhere on MUCH larger markets.

It all down to cost and where the Foundation wants to spend it’s money. It nothing to do with not wanting or not wanting Windows.

Thank you for response, I was only trying to make the OP aware of his mis-conceptions and unfortunately by doing so have started a FLAME.

I am not against Windows IoT and will adjust my nick, I am off to lie down in a darkened room.

jamesh wrote:It all down to cost and where the Foundation wants to spend it’s money. It nothing to do with wanting or not wanting Windows.

I do understand that all too well. I agree, working on stuff you don’t normally do requires exceptional needs, etc. and MS is busy doing its best to incorporate things as time goes on. The official Screen was supported in, what for MS anyway, was record time in 10556. The fact that Touch did not make it also then is regrettable. How is the Touch data transferred from the Screen to the Pi under Linux? I assume that info has been passed to MS.

fruitoftheloom wrote:I am not against Windows IoT and will adjust my nick, I am off to lie down in a darkened room.

«Windows 10 IoT Core ideal for »Internet of Things’ and so much more..'» Lol. Touchee. I too will lie down somewhere quiet for a while.

alantrundle wrote:
I am a fan of Visual Studio. It’s a very slick professional object orientated IDE, and very well supported. It’s my opinion that Microsoft will be the chosen O/S on the Pi, and linux will slowly fade away into the distance.

Agreed that VS is a great IDE, probably the best.

But you need to run it on a separate PC running Windows. Until it runs on the Pi itself, its fairly irrelevant to the Pi’s educational purpose, which is getting a computer in the hand of everyone. That’s simply doesn’t work if you also need another PC to program it.

Difficult to see how Windows could make up the gap to Linux, and the huge number of apps etc that already run on the Pi. Not being OSS also is a big stumbling block. The huge number of people using Linux in industry (compared with Windows) also has an impact.

So my opinion would be that Linux will remain the OS of choice on the Pi! The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

ricl wrote:

jamesh wrote:It all down to cost and where the Foundation wants to spend it’s money. It nothing to do with wanting or not wanting Windows.

I do understand that all too well. I agree, working on stuff you don’t normally do requires exceptional needs, etc. and MS is busy doing its best to incorporate things as time goes on. The official Screen was supported in, what for MS anyway, was record time in 10556. The fact that Touch did not make it also then is regrettable. How is the Touch data transferred from the Screen to the Pi under Linux? I assume that info has been passed to MS.

If they have asked for it, I don’t see why not — IIRC it’s an I2C connection, so not complicated. Like I said, the Foundation gives help when it is requested, but they don’t have the staff numbers to do much more.

Of course the Linux source is available, so they can always look at the Linux driver and see how that works.

alantrundle wrote:Hi,

On the issue of a development OS.

Well I purchased the raspberry pi 2 and official 7″ touchscreen for the sole purpose of development. The Pi is a nice piece of kit, but it’s limited as all ARM products are, and in truth beyond playing H264 video’s, listening to music there’s not much more you can do with one, except that it’s perfect for interfacing to micro-controllers like the Arduino which provides far more IO flexibility, to to be honest proper saves the day, as non real-time operating systems like linux/ windows are laggy when operating external SPI/I2C chips etc.

For those of you that like to play with the GPIO, I2C and SPI interfaces then I think the up and coming Microsoft IOT platform is the best one to choose. I am pretty sure that you could code an app, hopefully with touch ability soon to play/ stream video content to the DSI or HDMI port, so in truth it ticks many many boxes for making the most of a limited product.

That’s hope that Microsoft get the eGalax touch screen drivers sorted before the end of the year

Regards

Alan

Could obvious troll be more obvious?

ame wrote:

alantrundle wrote:Hi,

On the issue of a development OS.

Well I purchased the raspberry pi 2 and official 7″ touchscreen for the sole purpose of development. The Pi is a nice piece of kit, but it’s limited as all ARM products are, and in truth beyond playing H264 video’s, listening to music there’s not much more you can do with one, except that it’s perfect for interfacing to micro-controllers like the Arduino which provides far more IO flexibility, to to be honest proper saves the day, as non real-time operating systems like linux/ windows are laggy when operating external SPI/I2C chips etc.

For those of you that like to play with the GPIO, I2C and SPI interfaces then I think the up and coming Microsoft IOT platform is the best one to choose. I am pretty sure that you could code an app, hopefully with touch ability soon to play/ stream video content to the DSI or HDMI port, so in truth it ticks many many boxes for making the most of a limited product.

That’s hope that Microsoft get the eGalax touch screen drivers sorted before the end of the year

Regards

Alan

Could obvious troll be more obvious?

I did ask to keep it polite, please endeavour to do so. We are watching this thread. That’s Big Brother btw. And the NSA. And GCHQ. And probably some toher people as well. But mainly me.

Hi Jamesh,

I disagree with your comment that you would want to code on the Pi itself. In the past I used Netbeans with Java, at least until I discovered that the eGalax touch doesn’t work with the FX version. I was very impressed that I could code on my laptop with Netbeans and simply remotely deploy Java applications, and in case of swing I could redirect the output back to my laptop by setting a DISPLAY variable (1), running Xming (2), and enabling and running PuTTY in the background, oh and I have to set the DISPLAY variable in my bashrc file.

Coders alike I have my ultra special VS IDE set up on my i7 laptop, and have it set up specifically. I certainly would never contemplate running netbeans on the Pi or even VS ever in honesty.

on IOT you can deploy an application on the Pi Netbeans style, and then you can login to the IOT webpage on TCP8080, and set it to run as default, which is exactly what I want. My C# sharp application would run as soon as the Pi boots (full screen/ non windowed) as as per my preferred interface method, would communicate low-level I2C with my ATMega328 (Arduino boot-code) and then the micro-controller with it’s main loop, combination timer interrupts would fire SPI commands to something like an MFRC522 24/7, and only interrupt (poll) the pi when it has something for it.

JavaFX was my number one preferred, but now Oracle have withdrawn support it, has made Microsoft the number 1 choice for IDE GUI/ GPIO.

It’s very nearly perfect, and when it is, then I feel that University’s all around the world with adopt Windows 10, VS2015 and IOT as the number 1 professional single purpose O/S.

Regards

Alan

alantrundle wrote:Hi Jamesh,

I disagree with your comment that you would want to code on the Pi itself. In the past I used Netbeans with Java, at least until I discovered that the eGalax touch doesn’t work with the FX version. I was very impressed that I could code on my laptop with Netbeans and simply remotely deploy Java applications, and in case of swing I could redirect the output back to my laptop by setting a DISPLAY variable (1), running Xming (2), and enabling and running PuTTY in the background, oh and I have to set the DISPLAY variable in my bashrc file.

Coders alike I have my ultra special VS IDE set up on my i7 laptop, and have it set up specifically. I certainly would never contemplate running netbeans on the Pi or even VS ever in honesty.

on IOT you can deploy an application on the Pi Netbeans style, and then you can login to the IOT webpage on TCP8080, and set it to run as default, which is exactly what I want. My C# sharp application would run as soon as the Pi boots (full screen/ non windowed) as as per my preferred interface method, would communicate low-level I2C with my ATMega328 (Arduino boot-code) and then the micro-controller with it’s main loop, combination timer interrupts would fire SPI commands to something like an MFRC522 24/7, and only interrupt (poll) the pi when it has something for it.

JavaFX was my number one preferred, but now Oracle have withdrawn support it, has made Microsoft the number 1 choice for IDE GUI/ GPIO.

It’s very nearly perfect, and when it is, then I feel that University’s all around the world with adopt Windows 10, VS2015 and IOT as the number 1 professional single purpose O/S.

Regards

Alan

You need to think of the primary purpose of the Pi — education. Education needs lots of cheap devices that are good enough, they really don’t have the funds for PC’s plus Pi’s. And of course, children cannot take the PC home with them to do homework etc.

You can do development easily on the PI, just use an editor and compiler/Python. That’s what I do. They are all on there. C, C++, Python, C#, Java, Ruby, Fortran, Pascal. You name it, they are available.

I also do it on embedded systems I work with every day, without IDE’s.

When I started programming, I had a 16KB machine, a B&W telly and a cassette deck. The Pi is much better.

I am using 7″ touch screen on my RaspberryPi 3 Model B v1.2. My device is running Windows 10 IoT Core and I’ve designed the kit to run an application I am developing as a UWP application with interface. However, I’ve realised the screen never goes to sleep and I actually want it to go to sleep after X amount of time. There’s this screen saver mode on IoT Core settings but it literally is only screen saver. Is that even possible at all, to make the display go to sleep? I am willing to do it on the application level as well, if possible at all.

I am new to Raspberry world so go easy on me!

Edit: The touchscreen is the official Raspberry Pi 7″ touch screen.

asked Sep 16, 2017 at 23:58