Hi Ben, long time watcher of the TBHS. Love it & you. Need Help with Raspberry pi 2 & LCD please!

I have that same screen, ordered from china off e-mail for around $20.

Ill start by saying that you get what you pay for. It is not as easy to install but it works great!

These instructions should get it up and running on the Pi.

However, getting it to rotate was a pain and I ended up using bits and pieces of the Adafruit instructions as well.

You have to do quite a bit of mucking with the /boot/config.txt to include the fbtft device entries and some work on the X11Config to get it all rotated and the touch working correctly.

Hope it helps, If not drop me a line and Ill help you get it working.

well tried your options, think I'm just not doing something right. As I'm still only getting a white screen. nothing else.

is it possible for you to zip a fresh image with it all installed. and I can install that image on to my 16gb micro sd class 10 card.

and see if it at least gets the screen to work?

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Found someone with same screen (they had a image) but they have old Raspberry pi. Do not know if that matters or not in this case.

I had spare micro SD card so I applied the image to it. and it booted right up. not sure how but everything sort of works. But as this is I wont be able to use my own image or fresh copy of raspbian, or Ubuntu if I wanted to. I would not know how to make that work.

So if I want to use this 3.5" lcd it looks like I'm stuck using this guys image.

But   happy to find out that the LCD does work so does the tft part. the windows in the desktop environment are really hard to navigate due to resolution not sure how to make the windows

fit the 320 x 480 resolution.

Also another bummer with this image is I can not use the HDMI port anymore.

not sure how to make both work at same time or if they can even do that.

Tried to attach the image so you guys could check it out. but the size is over a 1gb even after I Rared it.

any ideas on any of these issues would be great. thanks for all the help so far.

Try running the touch screen calibration

sudo TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb1 TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/touchscreen ts_calibrate

sudo: ts_calibrate: command not found
is what i do when i do your command.

will this guide work for the 4 inch waveshare spotpear lcd I ccan get it to work on the supplied image but I want to use my propper pi image

and I would if attall possible use hdmi and screen and if not is it possible to stop kodi or xbmc going through hdmi and use the touch screen or both

I forgot to sayits pi b+ plus what is the comand to just switch outputs manully as the ones supplied dont seem to work hdmi-sys-show or lcd4-sys-show

honestly harvey I dont know. I think it will you will have to tinker with res size i think if yours gets a higher res than my 3.5" but it should work I think. as for getting both LCD & HDMI to work i have yet to be able to do that my self. currently still working out kings with the touch as it doesnt quite work yet.

also failing at getting my bluetooth stuff installed. I think this is probly the number 1 reason most windows users still havent moved to linux is because its not so simple to install stuff on.

But after all said and done I was so happy to see my screen work at all and even happier when I finaly got it to be in the rotation I wanted. So thank you guys for your help on this.

falon wrote:

 

sudo: ts_calibrate: command not found
is what i do when i do your command.

Did you install the command? You can do an aptitude or apt-get to search the repos and install it. I think it is part of libts-bin.

Mathew Harvey wrote:

 

will this guide work for the 4 inch waveshare spotpear lcd I ccan get it to work on the supplied image but I want to use my propper pi image

and I would if attall possible use hdmi and screen and if not is it possible to stop kodi or xbmc going through hdmi and use the touch screen or both

I have never tried it on a 4in screen and I have seen it reported that xbmc will work with the 3.5". Beyond that I dont know.

I use this setup (3.5" screen on a r-pi) as stand alone touch controls. For example, the one I am currently doing will be attached to an eggbot as the control panel allowing my wife to simple select the pattern she wants and go. No need for an extra computer.

They are also used on 3dprinters as the control panel to run pronterface.

With kdialog or gtkdialog you are write scripts that provide standard buttons on the screen and create the control panels you need for any project.

As such, once these screens are installed I have no need to switch back and forth between them and the HDMI port. Though digging through google there appears to be ways to do it but you would need to mod the config some.

falon wrote:

 

also failing at getting my bluetooth stuff installed. I think this is probly the number 1 reason most windows users still havent moved to linux is because its not so simple to install stuff on.

 

But after all said and done I was so happy to see my screen work at all and even happier when I finaly got it to be in the rotation I wanted. So thank you guys for your help on this.

Falon,

Congrats on getting it working!

Im going to take a moment here to comment on your statement that this is probably the number 1 reason most windows users have not switched to Linux. The truth is you have jumped off into the deep end of linux. lol

To put this into prospective, getting the LCD running is a PITA. I have been working with Linux for close to 25 years. Going back to the days of custom compiling everything and building the linux system by hand (Pre-Slackware 0.99), I am also a professional Linux engineer. With that in mind, it took me 5 days to figure out how to make the 3.5" screen work on the Raspberry Pi. IMHO that makes getting one of these low cost LCD's from china to work with no documentation a solid 8 on a 1 to 10 scale.

Raspbery Pi's are great little units but the Linux distributions for them are not the easiest to work with.  Desktop Linux distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu are far easier to work with and far more user friendly.

With that in mind, I think you are right to some extent. A lot of windows users will get something like a Raspberry pi to try Linux. Never realizing that they have jumped off into the deep end. They will then get frustrated because they dont understand it and think that all Linux is like that. To use a car analogy they try to build a kit car from the ground up and then get frustrated that it is not as easy as going to the car lot and buying a Ford or Chevy.

ok so i installed the

  sudo apt-get install evtest tslib libts-bin

then did update

then rebooted

and then did the

  sudo TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb1 TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/touchscreen ts_calibrate

then got the famous

sudo: ts_calibrate: command not found
is what i do when i do your command.

So i then googled how to install ts_calibrate,

everything I have found so far points to the install of the libts-bin

So I went to where it said /dev/input/touchscreen only to find I don't have a touchscreen directory.

This is what i have in my /dev/input/ directory

pi@rpi2-54 /dev/input $ ls
by-id    event0  event2  event4  mice    mouse1
by-path  event1  event3  event5  mouse0  mouse2

At this point I'm stuck. so maybe you know what I should do next? or so I'm hoping.

cyberlink,

I cannot thank you enough! I was just about to give up hope before finding this thread and your instructions. After doing as you said my display is fully functional touchscreen and all! FYI for others, I have a SainSmart 3.5" TFT touchscreen and the instructions in this thread worked as is.

falon - if you're somehow still searching for an answer to your calibration issue, try running ts_calibrate a few different times and each time try setting TSDEVICE as a different one of the "event" items in /dev/input. I had the same issue but once I tried event3 it worked like a charm.

cyberlink,

I cannot thank you enough! I was just about to give up hope before finding this thread and your instructions. After doing as you said my display is fully functional touchscreen and all! FYI for others, I have a SainSmart 3.5" TFT touchscreen and the instructions in this thread worked as is.

falon - if you're somehow still searching for an answer to your calibration issue, try running ts_calibrate a few different times and each time try setting TSDEVICE as a different one of the "event" items in /dev/input. I had the same issue but once I tried event3 it worked like a charm.