The first thing I had to do when designing my Pip-Boy was choose an appropriately-sized screen that I could connect to my Raspberry Pi.
I chose this screen from the marvelous Adafruit – it was about the right size, and it takes a composite-video input:
This screen and its driver-board were probably originally intended for use in an in-car monitor, for a reversing-camera or maybe for a portable DVD-player – it requires 6-12v of power to run, but I reckoned I ought to be able to supply that from some batteries.
The screen’s resolution is quite low (320×240) but that’s just fine for my purposes.
While waiting for that to arrive from far-off New York, I then searched for a rectangular lens to lay over the screen, to give the effect of a curved monitor.
After failing trying to find a cheap separate lens with the right shape and aspect-ratio, I ended up doing what a previous builder had done, and bought likely-looking cheap second-hand slide-viewer from Ebay, which I dismantled.
Photax Solar slide-viewer
This slide-viewer contains two chunky plastic lenses, and the largest of the lenses was just the right size and shape for what I needed:
A scale image of the in-game Pip-Boy 3000 – plus models of a Raspberry Pi, Adafruit 3.5″ monitor, and the lens I’d taken from a slideviewer
I was pleased to find that I could slot the screen into the slide-viewer where its smaller interior lens originally sat – making a delightful little CRT-looking monitor!
In order to get the RasPi to output to the full screen (i.e. no black borders) I edited its config.txt file with the following lines uncommented/changed:
framebuffer_width=640
framebuffer_height=480
disable_overscan=1
overscan_left=36
overscan_right=18
overscan_top=0
overscan_bottom=0
sdtv_mode=2
That combination of overscan/disabled options might seem a bit weird, but it allowed me to fill the whole of the TFT.
You’ll see that I’ve set it to use twice the screen’s resolution – I found that PyGame (which I’m using to draw the UI graphics) didn’t work right when the system-resolution was lower than 640×480.
The console-text and Xwindows are still just about readable at that resolution, if you squint carefully!
Coming up… how I modified this 6-12v screen to work on the RasPi’s 5v power-supply!
The ingame one is bulkier, which is why you’re having problems with wire and battery placement. If you hadded maybe half an inch, you might be able to place the battery inside the pipboy, and make it rechargeable?