FBTFT and Device Tree

I’ve remounted my TFT touch display and connected it to another Raspberry Pi. During the installation process I realized, that the FBTFT Kernel is now Device Tree enabled, this makes the installation and configuration process a lot easier. (https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki#install)

Therefore you only need to install the FBTFT enabled Firmware (https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware) and after that you can enable the TFT display HY-28B:

Add the following statement to /boot/config.txt to enable the hy28b overlay:

dtoverlay=hy28b, rotate=90

The overlays can be found on https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware/tree/master/overlays.

To enable the console output on the display you had to add the following to the first line of /boot/cmdline.txt:

fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:VGA8X8

After a reboot the display should be recognized and working. You can check it in dmesg.

To use the display with pygame you need to install the following packages and calibrate the touchpanel:

apt-get update
apt-get install libts-bin evtest xinput python-dev python-pip
pip install evdev
sudo TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb1 TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/event0 ts_calibrate

Update 1:
With the integration of the FBTFT drivers in the Raspberry Pi kernel (https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki) it is no longer neccessary to install notro’s FBTFT kernel.

Update 2:
I run in some problems with the display showing no content. The backlight was on but there were no image visible. I was able to fix the problem by setting the GPIO configuration fixed and not automatically:

dtoverlay=hy28b, rotate=90, resetgpio=25, ledgpio=18

4 thoughts on “FBTFT and Device Tree

  1. Hi
    I also use fbtft and the hy28b but the screen remains white. I see you have it working. Is this with Notro’s default hy28b-overlay.dtb file?
    I also have hy28a, but that is working ok. Any help you can give would be appreciated

    Thanks
    Texy

  2. Hi Texy,

    yes I used Notro’s default overlay file. I had the same problem with the screen for a while because the wiring was wrong. I think you should re-check your wiring of the hy28b.
    I’ve added the correct wiring in the post above.

    Good Luck,
    Trekky

  3. Hägi,

    Great info, thanks man. Have you been able to get your TFT shield working on OSMC by chance? I had one of Texy’s working with RaspBMC, but I can’t figure out how to get it working in OSMC now. Please let me know if you have any hints. Thanks,

    -miesch

  4. Hey miesch,

    I didn’t try to connect the TFT to the Raspberry Pi running OSMC. There must be a possibility to use FBTFT on OSMC and I don’t know whether this is implemented. Maybe you should check the official OSMC forum.

    Good Luck!

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