TX-Pi manual installation

This page describes the manual installation of the TX-Pi software setup. Beginners may prefer to use prepared system images instead.

The entire manual installation consists of three main steps:

  1. Install a standard raspbian operating system image onto SD card
  2. Do some minor manual preparations
  3. Run a script that will do all the tx-pi specific modifications

Step 1: Install Raspbian onto SD card

Get an SD card image of e.g. Raspberry Pi OS Buster Lite (recommended) or Raspbian Stretch Lite and install it onto SD card. Other versions may work as well but the aforementioned ones have been tested. More information on installing rasbian on SD card can be found here.

If the Raspberry Pi4 is being used then Raspberry Pi OS Buster Lite should be used.

Please note that only the linked Raspberry Pi OS versions work, other versions may create inconveniences or may not work at all.

Insert the SD card into your Pi and boot it. Unless you are very familiar with the Pi and are able to do a headless setup you should have a keyboard and HDMI display connected to the Pi.

Step 2: Do some manual preparations

Connect your touch display (Waveshare 3,2", Waveshare 3,5" type "A", or Waveshare 3,5" type "B")

Start your Raspberry Pi.

Step 3: Run the TX-Pi setup

Log into your Pi. Use the login pi and the password raspberry.

Now download the setup script by typing:

wget https://tx-pi.de/tx-pi-setup.sh

and run the script by typing sudo bash ./tx-pi-setup.sh

This will now take about one hour and download and install a lot of programs from the internet onto your Pi. Once the installation is done your Pi will automatically reboot and it will boot into the user interface of the fischertechnik community firmware.

Support for 3.5" screens

The TX-Pi also supports the 3.5" TFT displays from Waveshare. To configure TX-Pi for one of these instead of the default 3.2" version the install script has to be invoked with a special option.

If you use the regular (A) type display from waveshare: sudo bash ./tx-pi-setup.sh LCD35

and if you have the IPS (B) type display: sudo bash ./tx-pi-setup.sh LCD35B

If you have the IPS (B) revision 2.0 type display: sudo bash ./tx-pi-setup.sh LCD35BV2

The 3.5" display has a resolution of 320x480 pixel while the 3.2" display and the display of the fischertechnik TXT only provide 240x320 pixels. Thus some apps written for the TXT or the regular TX-Pi setup may look a little different. But due to the Qt framework most apps will just look fine.