8" TFT for the Raspberry Pi

A small device calls for a small screen (or no screen at all). Luckily, I remembered that I bought a 8" TFT some years ago. I never used it for it's intended use case (I don't even remember what that was...), so I found it buried under some other electronic waste.

It is an Innovatek TM-868. It has VGA, audio connectors, an USB connector for touchscreen and a Composite Video connector. VGA is useless for the Raspberry Pi, but the Composite Video connector is of interest here, because there is a corresponding connector on the Raspberry Pi. This works out of the box, but only when you don't connect the HDMI cable at the same time, because the Pi can only drive one display at a time. If you want to leave the HDMI cable connected, you can also set an appropriate setting in the configuration file:

hdmi_ignore_hotplug=1

You can also set the video mode:

sdtv_mode=2 (PAL) or 0 (NTSC)

There are many other configuration options, but in most cases it should work directly as with my setup:

Next step is to connect the touchscreen.