Quickly test an IL9341 2.2 inch 2.2" SPI TFT display on Raspbmc media-center on raspberry pi

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It is a cool idea to hook up a small tft display to the raspberry pi for portable operations. I usually use raspbmc and here is a quick guide to setup an il9341 tft module to the gpio pins on the raspberry pi via spi. The module has 9 connections for the display and 4 for the SD card. Here we use the display pins.
In order to get the raspbmc/xbmc display on the pi, we use the fbtft driver by norto.

GPIO pins on the raspberry pi

TFT MODULE  

The module is 2.2" one with the following connections and an il9341 controller. Data sheet here and more details on the module can be read here.

• SDO: Serial clock output
• LED: 3.4V Power Supply pin
• SCL: Serial clock input
• SDA / SDI: Serial data input
• DC: Data / Command selection
• RST: Reset, Low level active
• CS: Chip Selection, Low level active
• GND: Ground
• VDD33: 3.3V Power Supply pin

CONNECTION TO GPIO on PI

The connection to GPIO are summarised in the figure below. More on GPIO can be read at elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals

il9341 connection to GPIO on raspberry pi

Pin Mapping

+------------+--------+
|  LCD-PIN   |  GPIO  |
+------------+--------+
| SDO (MISO) | MISO   |
| LED        | GPIO18 |
| SCK        | SCLK   |
| SDI(MOSI)  | MOSI   |
| D/C        | GPIO24 |
| RESET      | GPIO25 |
| CS         | CE0    |
| GND        | GND    |
| VCC        | 3.3v   |
+------------+--------+

Note: Add a 50 ohm resistor to the LED pin

Software

1) Install Raspbmc (instruction can be seen at here)

2) ssh into the pi and follow the rest on the pi, one by one (user:pi password:raspberry)

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates -y
sudo apt-get install git-core binutils -y
sudo wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update
sudo -E RPI_UPDATE_UNSUPPORTED=0 REPO_URI=https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware BRANCH=next rpi-update
sudo reboot

3) Now edit the modules file by

sudo nano /etc/modules

and add

fbtft dma
fbtft_device name=adafruit22a rotate=270 speed=48000000 fps=50 debug=32

The debug can be later removed after debug (as it output stuff to dmesg and can be turned off later by adding  verbose=0 in place of debug

Now reboot the pi and we are ready to go. If you see a dark display, things are fine and need a small step to get the raspbmc in to the tft. But if the display stays white, something is wrong! may be the display name need to be changed to match the one you have.

Get /compil a small program called fbcp, which copies the framebuffer to the tft

sudo cp /boot/fbcp /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/fbcp

and finally run fbcp and you have the raspbmc on the tft!!

fbcp&

fbcp can be found here  or a compiled version at here

wget https://github.com/riyas-org/rpi-fbcp/blob/master/fbcp?raw=true

Video Demo

A working solution can be watched after a break