A very ghetto Raspberry Pi setup

Siren · · 1 min read

Here is the Ghetto-Pi running i3

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi 3b+
  • 3.5" TFT screen
  • A 5Ah smartphone powerbank with 5V and 1.5A as output
  • Bluetooth keyboard of unknown brand
  • Enclosure: Who needs enclosure? We are ghetto, we don’t own a 3D printer.

All of the above are from Aliexpress.

Software

I didn’t want to have issues with the TFT’s drivers so I chose the recommended distro, that is Raspbian. And because I wanted no DE to start with I flashed the minimal ISO.

For the touchscreen drivers cloned the repo:

git clone https://github.com/waveshare/LCD-show.git

This part requires network connection:

chmod +x LCD35-show
./LCD35-show

Installed Xorg, i3wm and dmenu:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo xinit i3 dmenu

Bluetooth on the Pi was weird. The systemd service throws errors and shows inactive but it still works.

kernal@raspberrypi:~ $ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# power on
[bluetooth]# agent on
[bluetooth]# scan on
[bluetooth]# pair <mac from scan here>
[bluetooth]# trust <mac>

The last line is so that the Pi auto-connects to the keyboard.