There is now an official 7" touch screen for the Raspberry Pi:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-ea ... i-display/
This is interesting because it is an another possible route for SpreadPi to run as a standalone kiosk. Similar to boredland's pioneering work on running Spreads directly on a tablet. With a touch screen, you have an integrated input, output, and controller that could be mounted onto any book scanner. This is much nicer than being forced to rely on an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Or requiring a network connection and a second device to act as a UI for the controller.
The advantage of adding a touch screen to a Raspberry Pi is that the Pi has much more flexible connectors, with GPIO pins, multiple built-in USB ports, and a separate power connector. It also has an OS (Raspbian) that is more open and configurable by default as opposed to Android which requires more effort to root it and set up an environment. On the other hand, the nice thing about running on a tablet is that it is a single integrated package with no need to worry about an external case. And tablets are consistently more powerful than the puny Raspberry Pi. Even the new Pi 2 is relatively low-powered compared to most tablets these days.
Either way, it is great to have another option to move the ball forward on making Spreads more plug and play. I will be following developments on this closely.
-D
Raspberry Pi Official Touch Screen
Moderator: peterZ