STICKY: Using a Gert VGA 666 adapter - [HOWTO]

[PiGraham]

When I do this bit -

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fenlo ... ob-dpi.bin
sudo mv dt-blob-dpi.bin /boot/dt-blob.bin

I get a 'not permitted' error on the second part regarding the /boot/dt-blob.bin?

Can anybody help please?

I tried to carry on anyway and when I reboot, the screen comes on initially in low res and looks like it'll work, then goes black .

Do you see dt-blob.bin listed when you type:

Code: Select all

ls /boot

Have you completed the other steps to change /boot/config.txt and /etc/modprobe.d/vga666-blacklist.conf?

[mancity]

Yes I see it.

[mancity]

This is exactly what I see at that point -

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo mv dt-blob-dpi.bin /boot/dt-blob.bin
mv: failed to preserve ownership for `/boot/dt-blob.bin': Operation not permitted

[mancity]

Hmmm. Appears to work now.

[DougieLawson]

sudo -i
cd /boot
cp /home/pi/dt-blo*bin .
rm /home/pi/dt-blo*bin
exit

[DirkS]

This is exactly what I see at that point -

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo mv dt-blob-dpi.bin /boot/dt-blob.bin
mv: failed to preserve ownership for `/boot/dt-blob.bin': Operation not permitted

The message just means that it cannot preserve user 'pi' as the owner, and it will be changed to 'root'. The file will still be copied / moved.
I assume that's because /boot is on a FAT partition where the owner is fixed to 'root'.

Gr.
Dirk.

[thekeywordgeek]

Having just followed the procedure and now using the VGA monitor to post this message I can confirm that the procedure outlined in this thread also works with a Raspberry Pi 2.

[David &ben]

Hi, just started with pi B+ with my son and I'm new to Linux. We've soldered Gert666 but really struggling to find a real idiots guide to getting it working. Does anyone have a real step-by-step guide for people who are currently pretty clueless about programming Raspbian ? I've scoured the internet but all guide's presume some knowledge of the language. Once we've got his vga monitor working we'll be able to get learning ! many thanks, david &ben

[BMS Doug]

Hi, just started with pi B+ with my son and I'm new to Linux. We've soldered Gert666 but really struggling to find a real idiots guide to getting it working. Does anyone have a real step-by-step guide for people who are currently pretty clueless about programming Raspbian ? I've scoured the internet but all guide's presume some knowledge of the language. Once we've got his vga monitor working we'll be able to get learning ! many thanks, david &ben

Unfortunately the first post of this thread is the best instructions that you will find.

You will need to connect your pi to the internet and a HDMI TV or monitor and type in the instructions line by line as they are listed on the first post.

Let us know where you run into problems.

[B.Goode]

Hi, just started with pi B+ with my son and I'm new to Linux. We've soldered Gert666 but really struggling to find a real idiots guide to getting it working. Does anyone have a real step-by-step guide for people who are currently pretty clueless about programming Raspbian ? I've scoured the internet but all guide's presume some knowledge of the language. Once we've got his vga monitor working we'll be able to get learning ! many thanks, david &ben

I haven't put my adapter together yet, but I was planning to follow the guide given at the start of this thread to get it to work. Does your question mean you have done this and found that it is not correct?

[DirkS]

Hi, just started with pi B+ with my son and I'm new to Linux. We've soldered Gert666 but really struggling to find a real idiots guide to getting it working. Does anyone have a real step-by-step guide for people who are currently pretty clueless about programming Raspbian ? I've scoured the internet but all guide's presume some knowledge of the language. Once we've got his vga monitor working we'll be able to get learning ! many thanks, david &ben

Unfortunately the first post of this thread is the best instructions that you will find.

You will need to connect your pi to the internet and a HDMI TV or monitor and type in the instructions line by line as they are listed on the first post.

Let us know where you run into problems.

I can see some potential problems when using the current Raspbian image which uses the full device tree implementation.
Unfortunately I can't test that at the moment as I don't have a VGA cable / monitor available...

[jonathanc]

Hello,

I soldered the resistors on the wrong side of the board. In the guide i made a mistake because of this : "The connectors are at the same side as the surface mount resistors."

I didnt know that "surface mount resistors" where another kind of resistors. So i soldered my normal resistors on the same side as the connector using the "SMD" side picture as a reference. But in the end, each resistor is where it should be but just on the wrong side of the board. I checked with a multimeter and there's no mistakes except this side thing.

But still, my adapter doesnt work. The screen stays black when i reboot and doesn't seem to get a signal. So i was wondering, does it really matter that my resistor are on the wrong side ? Or is it because something could be not soldered properly ? I'm really new to electronics...

Maybe the problem is that my resistor are in contact with the surface resistors slots?

hope that all make sense.

thank you for your help.

[rpdom]

It shouldn't matter which side the resistors are mounted as long as they are in the right positions. I can't see that they could cause any problems with the SMD pads.

More important is that the connectors are on the correct side of the board.

[Matty11611]

Hi, just started with pi B+ with my son and I'm new to Linux. We've soldered Gert666 but really struggling to find a real idiots guide to getting it working. Does anyone have a real step-by-step guide for people who are currently pretty clueless about programming Raspbian ? I've scoured the internet but all guide's presume some knowledge of the language. Once we've got his vga monitor working we'll be able to get learning ! many thanks, david &ben

Unfortunately the first post of this thread is the best instructions that you will find.

You will need to connect your pi to the internet and a HDMI TV or monitor and type in the instructions line by line as they are listed on the first post.

Let us know where you run into problems.

Just to make you guys feel better im a noob to linux aswell and found its an issue with the current version of raspian and not human error, unsure how to fix currently but i know this much thanks to DirkS
I can see some potential problems when using the current Raspbian image which uses the full device tree implementation.
Unfortunately I can't test that at the moment as I don't have a VGA cable / monitor available...

[tvjon]

snapshot.png (40.22 KiB) Viewed 15242 times

I received my 666 yesterday, built it, & have just been testing it. I'm typing this with an old 1024 768 display attached. I was going to fire up my oscilloscope to have a look at the signals, but then it occurred to me to check with joan's

PISCOPE

as I'm experimenting with it for another project.

Attached is an interesting screen shot from PISCOPE whilst using this display, so if you feel like installing

PIGPIO & PISCOPE,

available from:

http://abyz.co.uk/rpi/pigpio/index.html

you could see if you have any activity on the relevant GPIO pins?

[tvjon]

If anyone using Gert's adapter would like to use both hdmi & vga simultaneously, I've found this to work ok:

My relevant settings in

config.sys

enable_dpi_lcd=1
display_default_lcd=0


Open terminal (visible screen being hdmi, as display default for DPI is set to 0 above)

pi@pi2 ~ $ omxplayer --display 4 pi2-clkpwm.webm.mp4

Obviously choose your own video file.

Below is terminal output for the poor quality attached jpeg.

pi@pi2 ~ $ omxplayer --display 4 pi2-clkpwm.webm.mp4

Invalid framerate 1000, using forced 25fps and just trust timestamps
Video codec omx-vp8 width 1280 height 800 profile -99 fps 25.000000
Subtitle count: 0, state: off, index: 1, delay: 0
V:PortSettingsChanged: 1280x800@1000.00 interlace:0 deinterlace:0 anaglyph:0 par:1.00 layer:0
V:PortSettingsChanged: 1280x800@1000.00 interlace:0 deinterlace:0 anaglyph:0 par:1.00 display:4 layer:0
have a nice day

I actually have the DPI setting for 1024*768, but have since tried another old vga monitor, capable of 1280*1024 & it seems happy to play high res' files.

VGA666 is currently displaying a BBC HD recording & cpu usage hasn't risen beyond 10%.

666dualmonitors.jpg (63.83 KiB) Viewed 15171 times

[Matty11611]

tvjon, this is great, i have managed to get omxplayer successfully working on a secondary screen, any ideas how i can do a similar thing with impress, load up the software on the vga display then output the impress file on the HDMI, is this possible using gerts vga, thanks

Matty11611

[LeZandre]

At the moment it seems I can only get eather HDMI or VGA.
Could someone explain how to configure a system with a "spread desktop" over two attached monitors ?
By this I mean one monitor as the 'main desktop' and the other as 'extended' desktop.

Also, using the preferences - monitor settings, I only get one monitor detected.

[tvjon]

..i have managed to get omxplayer successfully working on a secondary screen, any ideas how i can do a similar thing with impress, ...
Matty11611

Thank you for the feedback. Good to know it works well for someone else.

I think we'll need to wait for the Foundation to release a more general interface for X-windows to do that, I'm afraid. As it is fortunately a DPI interface(with a D2A attached) the Foundation may be trying to do 2 things in one go, as what they do for DSI may be almost directly applicable to DPI

I'd like to run joan's PISCOPE application on VGA666, but it needs GTK+ which in turns needs X, so I'll have to wait.

There's still a useful amount of things one can do now though.

Whilst typing this on a Pi2, "hello_teapot" is displaying on the other attached screen, vga666, with a total cpu usage of 2%

I've converted a couple of "hello_pi" applications, along with a basic slideshow application to use vga666 (or HDMI - just supply the display number as an argument to the application).

So even now, more than just omxplayer is practical.

Having the DPI available as a separate display is very useful. Kiosk displays can run 2 independent AV displays from 1 RPi, at better quality than composite. It's useful when testing GPU programs, because you can see the result on VGA, & edit the code displayed on the HDMI screen, without the display being obliterated by the GPU output.

There are so many cheap & second hand VGA displays & build times are decent now on RPi2, so not so much a need for another computer to SSH into RPi. I bought a second-hand vga monitor last year for a quarter of the cost of RPi, so it's in keeping with RPi's low cost philosophy

[stebu]

When I do this bit -

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fenlo ... ob-dpi.bin
sudo mv dt-blob-dpi.bin /boot/dt-blob.bin

I get a 'not permitted' error on the second part regarding the /boot/dt-blob.bin?

Can anybody help please?

I tried to carry on anyway and when I reboot, the screen comes on initially in low res and looks like it'll work, then goes black .

try:

Code: Select all

sudo su
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fenlogic/vga666/master/setup/dt-blob-dpi.bin
sudo mv dt-blob-dpi.bin /boot/dt-blob.bin

[Matty11611]

tvjon, you mention that you have managed to get this working on other software aswell as omx player, can you help me define how i can work out what display number i need for impress, i have tried using a similar line to the one used for omx player but when i run it with impress its saying the screen doesnt exist.

Any help would be much appreciated
Matt

[tvjon]

If anyone using Gert's nice vga666 buys the new Foundation designed LCD 7" display, ensure that you disable this line by prefixing with a # thus:

#enable_dpi_lcd=1

in

/boot/config.txt

otherwise you'll wonder if you have a defective display!

I haven't discovered how to enable both displays yet, but it should be possible according to Gert's doc's.

HTH

[JSingleton]

I'm having trouble getting this VGA adapter to work with these instructions. Pretty sure I soldered it correctly and it all meters fine.

Can anyone confirm that it still works with the latest firmware and kernel? I'm not sure if it needs to be installed differently with the new device tree system. There is a DTS file in the repository (https://github.com/fenlogic/vga666/blob ... ob-dpi.dts) but this doesn't seem to be used. Should it be?

One VGA monitor I tried stops the pi from booting if connected at power up. I get this error before even NOOBS starts.

Code: Select all

sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

Another monitor doesn't have this issue but I never get a VGA signal out for either. Haven't put a scope on the GPIO pins yet though.

I've tried many SD cards and different ways of disabling i2c and SPI. Creating the file to blacklist and disabling in raspi-config (which adds lines to config.txt).

I've also tried disabling the new device tree in raspi-config but nothing works. Can't think of what else to try or how to debug this. Any ideas?

[tvjon]

"Can anyone confirm that it still works with the latest firmware and kernel? "

It works fine.

Just read the previous few posts. You don't need a real 'scope, as you can use Joan's excellent PISCOPE as I mentioned, but obviously a 'scope check will tell you of any activity.

You need to post your config.txt file, along with a listing of your

/boot/overlays

folder, for anyone to be able to help you.

I only use Raspbian, not NOOBS, so I don't know of any differences there may be with overlays, but unlikely I imagine.

[2spiK]

Hi !

We have bought the famous VGA 666, and we have make it, plugged on Rpi b+
We would like to display 2 differents web pages on 2 Dell monitor E207wfp but we encounter some trouble...
Actually, we can power up at the same time the monitor on HDMI AND the monitor on VGA only if we test with omxplayer,
Finally, we would like to get a classic Raspbian desktop with chromium to display our web page but the VGA monitor still power on with the green light but no display except if we use omxplayer.

Could you help me please ?

Thx