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

Question

Super new to the raspberry pi scene been watching you do various projects with them and figured it would be something new and cool to check out. got my noobs installed perfect now running raspbian.

been moving along following different tutorials trying out new things.

I finaly got stuff working on my Raspbian good and I'm starting to get a little more comfortable doing stuff on my Pi like, 1.) Installed apache and MySQL got wordpress working. (been tinkering around with it a little) also got a working copy of minecraft server vrs.1.8.4 working on my Pi.

Recently wanted to make it a bit more portable.

So I bought the 3.5" TFT LCD from Waveshare spotpear.

thought it was a no brainer plug N play with the Gpio

I pretty sure it is. but I cant seem to get or find proper soft ware, & or documentation to easily install it. there was no software when I got my lcd. it told me to go to few sites which were for the older pi.

I've read through few pages of peoples post seems a lot of new and regulars on the Pi scene are having similar problems with lcd installations.

Currently My pi is running on hdmi to tv.

Best Related web page related info I could find so far Is http://www.wvshare.com/product/3.5inch-RPi-LCD-A.htm

Please say you can help figure this out.

Also, if anyone else who reads this if you also have a raspi2 w/ the 3.5" tft lcd Waveshare Spotpear addon card let us know if you got it working right and if so let us know what you did or didn't do, please also provide software as I have been unable to find it.

e14 Contributor · Answer

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.

e14 Contributor · Answer

There is an old saying about giving a man a fish. Rather than giving you an image, how about I give you step by step instruction with explanations. Get the latest copy of the Raspbian and boot your pi up. The first time you boot it, there will be a menu to expand the image and do some other stuff. go ahead and set it up as you like. The change is that under Advanced Options you need to turn on " SPI ENABLE/DISABLE AUTOMATIC LOADING “ once you are back in and at a command line run the following command sudo REPO_URI= https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware rpi-update This will download and update the firmware. Once this process is done it will tell you that you have to reboot. Do do that yet, lets get some other setup out of the way edit the /boot/cmdline.txt by doing a sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt In this file is a single long line that is used during boot. Add the following to the end of it. fbtft_device.custom fbtft_device.name=flexfb fbtft_device.gpios=dc:24,reset:25 fbtft_device.bgr=1 fbtft_device.speed=16000000 This sets up the frame buffer to use the 3.5" screen and tells it to load the device. If you want the 3.5" screen to be your only video device you can add fbcon=map:1 fbcon=font:VGA8x8 To the end of the line as well. That sets it up so when booting it shows all the boot information on the screen in the correct resolution and font size. Now save the file and exit. Next we need to setup the kernel module. open it by running the command sudo nano /etc/modules Now add the following to the end of the file # WaveShare SpotPear 3.5" LCD fbtft_device debug=3 rotate=90 name=flexfb speed=16000000 gpios=reset:25,dc:24 flexfb width=320 height=480 regwidth=16 init=-1,0xb0,0x0,-1,0x11,-2,250,-1,0x3A,0x55,-1,0xC2,0x44,-1,0xC5,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,-1,0xE0,0x0F,0x1F,0x1C,0x0C,0x0F,0x08,0x48,0x98,0x37,0x0A,0x13,0x04,0x11,0x0D,0x00,-1,0xE1,0x0F,0x32,0x2E,0x0B,0x0D,0x05,0x47,0x75,0x37,0x06,0x10,0x03,0x24,0x20,0x00,-1,0xE2,0x0F,0x32,0x2E,0x0B,0x0D,0x05,0x47,0x75,0x37,0x06,0x10,0x03,0x24,0x20,0x00,-1,0x36,0xF8,-1,0x11,-1,0x29,-3 # Touchscreen ads7846_device model=7846 cs=1 gpio_pendown=17 keep_vref_on=1 swap_xy=0 pressure_max=255 x_plate_ohms=60 x_min=200 x_max=3900 y_min=200 y_max=3900 The above may be wrapped. The file that starts with flexfb should be one single line all the way to the -3 at the end. This configures the drives for both the display and the touch screen. Read through those lines carefully as you may need to change the "rotate" on the fbtft driver and you may need to change the "swap_xy=" on the touch screen to make it the way you want it. Personally, I loaded them as is and then went back to adjust later. Now save that file and open the /boot/config.txt file for editing with the command sudo nano /boot/config.txt Add the following line to the bottom of the file dtoverlay=piscreen,speed=16000000,rotate=90 save and exit the editor. This activates the touchscreen with the same rotation as the fbtft driver. Go ahead and reboot the unit. when it comes up the screen should go from white to black. No log back in and we can set up the XWindows system to work with the display. You need to edit the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf This is the config for the frame Buffer driver in X11. sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf look for the line that reads Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0" That is what tells it to use the HDMI port. So change that to Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb1" /dev/fb1 is the 3.5" screen. You can now save that file. The last step is to set the touch screen up. Edit the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.config file with sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.config The last entry should read Section "InputClass" Identifier "evdev touchscreen catchall" MatchIsTouchscreen "on" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Driver "evdev" EndSection You want to add a line just before Driver that reads Option "GrabDevice" "True" Other useful options include Option "InvertY" "True" Option "InvertX" "True" Option "SwapAxes" "True" Inverts the direction of X/Y or swaps the Axes, which is used if you move your finger up and the courser goes left or right. Save that file and you should be ready to startx

e14 Contributor · Answer

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.

e14 Contributor · Answer

Try running the touch screen calibration sudo TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb1 TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/touchscreen ts_calibrate

e14 Contributor · Answer

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.

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

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