Pi not using full screen

Question

I'm using Raspberry Pi 3 and a 5" TFT LCD I got from Newegg. There is a large black space on the right side of the screen where nothing is being displayed. How can I get the Pi to use the full screen?

Answer 1

I'm assuming you are using Raspbian?

First things first, make sure you are powering the Pi with a decent 2A 5V power supply. Ensure the Pi has fully recognized the display by running:

dmesg | grep -i ft5406

If everything is good you will get this output:

[ 5.224267] rpi-ft5406 rpi_ft5406: Probing device
[ 5.225960] input: FT5406 memory based driver as /devices/virtual/input/input3

There's a possibility overscan might be enabled so going into raspi-config and disable it.

If you look in the config.txt file on the SD card you should find some lines of code that look like this:

#overscan_left=-20
#overscan_right=-20
#overscan_top=-20
#overscan_bottom=-20

It might be worth uncommenting the left or right line by removing the hashtag, so you would end up with this instead, for example:

overscan_left=-20
#overscan_right=-20
#overscan_top=-20
#overscan_bottom=-20

If you installed the OS using NOOBs check if these lines of code are present at the bottom of the config.txt file:

#NOOBS Auto-generated settings
overscan_left=24
overscan_right=24
overscan_top=16
overscan_bottom=16
disable_overscan=0

To prevent any of these lines of code from taking effect just add a # in front of the line of code. I would suggest commenting out all of them before you try anything else.