Getting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi - Jeff GeerlingGetting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi<br>Aug 20, 2026
The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi).<br>The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution!<br>Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of their own devices, and built a Linux kernel driver for it which they intend to upstream.<br>Not only that, they've open sourced a Pi HAT design which adapts the Raspberry Pi 5 or CM4's MIPI connection1 to the special 39-pin connector on the Steam Deck LCD.<br>The repository linked above has detailed build instructions, and the KiCAD project if you'd like to build a HAT of your own. Scandent was kind enough to send me not one but two prototype HATs (the first one was damaged in shipping), and I put together this setup for testing:
Scandent isn't planning on productizing the HAT, they just wanted a decent touchscreen they could use that will be in good supply for at least a few years. Making it more accessible to hobbyists or others building Pi-based touchscreen projects should strengthen the market for this LCD, too.<br>From what I understand, LCD panels like these are often built for a specific purpose, and if a product line that uses it stops being manufactured, the specific LCD gets discontinued at some point, meaning downstream users have to work on supporting another one.<br>Just like switching from one SoC to another creates annoying rework, trying to sync up hardware signaling and a working kernel driver with multiple touchscreens is a pain.<br>I tested the Steam Deck LCD on a Raspberry Pi 5, and found it to work quite well. In person, I didn't see any real flickering or waviness, and brightness was good, even under my studio lights.<br>The touch targets are a little bit iffy at the Pi's default resolution scaling, but if you bump that up or build your own HMI/UI, you can make this thing quite usable. Maybe someone out there will build out the rest of the hardware and a 3D print for a RetroPie-based open source Steam Deck?<br>The CM5 should work, but has not yet been tested. ↩︎
Further reading:<br>Raspberry Pi Connect may control Windows soon<br>Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi<br>Raspberry Pi's new AI HAT adds 8GB of RAM for local LLMs
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