Introduction

This page describes how I went about connecting a small 2.2” TFT display to the Raspberry Pi. This page is mainly for reference about what chip is in the display and what modules are required to make it work.

X server running on the 2.2" TFT in portrait mode.

The hardware

The display is I purchases is a 2.2” Colour TFT with a resolution of 320x240. It is controlled with the ILI9340C LCD driver chip via the SPI bus and runs on 3.3v.  They can be found on eBay for a ~$6 AUD.

This was then connected to the Raspberry using the GPIO header by making up a short adapter cable between the two. The pinouts I used are as follows:

LCD PinRPI PinRPI Pin #

BL_LED GPIO_18 12
SCK SCLK 23
MISO MISO 21
MOSI MOSI 19
CS CE0 24
RST GPIO 25 22
D/C GPIO 24 18
Vin 3.3V 17
GND GND 20

Giving a cable that looks something like this: 26 way ribbon cable cut and soldered to the TFT

 

The Software

There’s an excellent driver written by Notro and called FBTFT and can be downloaded from his repository here: https://github.com/notro/fbtft

 

Setup

Here’s how I setup mine. I can’t really take any credit for this, I just followed the instructions provided by Notro and choose the right module.

Check the spi line is commented out

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

Install a the new kernel modules

sudo REPO_URI=https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware rpi-update
sudo shutdown -r now

Load the modules, which in our case is adafruit22a

sudo modprobe fbtft_device name=adafruit22a

 

I then made it permanent by adding the following to /etc/modules

fbtft_device name=adafruit22a verbose=0

and the following to /boot/cmdline.txt

fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:VGA8x8 fbcon=rotate:1

Then you should get something that looks like this:

X server running on the 2.2" TFT in portrait mode.