In the spec sheet you posted, see where it says CN3 on page 4 &5. This is an optional connector that may (or may not) be on the board.

Pins 3 & 4 are 5v and 5 & 6 are GND.

Note, however, unless you want to do some simple PCB soldering this isn’t the way to go. What I did was attach some header pins to the board, cut one end off a USB cable and attached it to the pins, then plugged it in the normal way into the RPi.

I wrote one for pulling data from the Enphase Envoy-C (directly, but only ones with old firmware). There is also one for pulling from Enphase Enlighten API (couldn’t get an API key for reasons to date I can’t figure out)

I also believe there is one for PVOutput.

You may also find an openHAB plugin exists for your system, and then you can use MMM-Openhab.

My MMM-EnphaseEnvoy module could easily be modified to fetch data from other sources if you want very simple display - it is limited to current power, generated today, this week, and lifetime.

-Earle

More specifically:

(http://www.panelook.com/upload/201511/MNT686762A_12516-Specification_A2_(1)_201511187301.pdf)

Supplies 5v on the CN3 pins (probably headless on the board, but 5v is there)

This guy says it’s good up to 1.5 amps (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=67312)

I’ve confirmed that this is there and can indeed power the rpi - however, you if you need to power USB devices from the pi, it may not be enough.

-Earle

Depending on which controller board you actually end up with (sometimes ebay gives out different ones) - the controller itself may have a 5v output already on it that you can use.

Someone suggested this about a year ago, but I don’t think anyone has tried.

But BENJA in theory might work: https://benja.io/

I have an inexpensive Astromaster LT80 AZ - but the cheap tripod mount really is difficult to. Been wanting to upgrade, but haven’t managed to yet.

I like what you did with the power, nice and clean. FYI, a number of the LCD driver boards have 5v outputs and I’ve successfully powered an rpi3 from the output from the board itself.

(http://www.panelook.com/upload/201511/MNT686762A_12516-Specification_A2_(1)_201511187301.pdf)

Supplies 5v on the CN3 pins (probably headless on the board, but 5v is there)

This guy says it’s good up to 1.5 amps (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=67312)

I wired it to a USB cable rather than directly to the GPIO

-Earle

This module is great - a couple items related to support for the ‘official 7" pi touchscreen’
I can probably code this up and submit a PR if you want - the on/off is easy to do because that is already in the helper. Brightness would need to get moved to the helper away from the CSS tricks.

It is interesting that controlling the brightness of a monitor itself over HDMI is surprisingly non-existent, but the 7" touchscreen h/w rev: 1.1 does indeed support direct brightness manipulation:

You can control the brightness of the backlight itself by:

echo X > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/brightness

where X is a value between 0 and 255

And you can turn off the backlight with

echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power

and turn it back on with:

echo 1 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power

Earle

Hello-Lucy is unlikely to work well on an rpi though, correct? At least this is my understanding…

Just to followup on my CSS, the following should center the content pretty well on most setups - I can’t figure out why I have to manually set the height though, but if I don’t the border doesn’t draw around all the text.

This creates something like a “pop-up” in the middle of your screen for the content, which works pretty well for me.

.infoCenter {  
  position: fixed;
  left: 50%;
  top: 50%;
  transform: translate(-50%,-50%); // This centers the box
  width: 80vw; // set the width to about 80% of the screen
  height: 20vw; // set the height to about 20% of the screen
}