Raspberry Pi 3.5" LCD (MPI3501)

update …

Using the dwrobel Fedora Server spin image linked at rpmfusion (Service End for Bintray, JCenter, GoCenter, and ChartCenter | JFrog), I managed to get the framebuffer to work using tft35-overlay.dtb from goodtft/LCD-show/ .

While upstream kernel 5.10 carry ili9486 kernel module, it however do not carry fbtft_device module, apparently fbtft was removed at kernel 5.4 for some reason, but without a clear alternative available.

Steps to make things work:

  • write fedora server image from dwrobel into the sdcard, arm-image-installer seems unable to work with this image well, so you could not conveniently resize the partition nor set ssh key. I could not get the system to boot into the rpi kernel if i used official image and dnf install the rpi kernel.

  • if you need ssh key, you can mount the sdcard root partition , and create /root/.ssh/authorized_keys yourself

  • in /boot/config.txt, add following lines above [pi4] block (ie: implicit [all] block)

    hdmi_force_hotplug=1
    dtparam=i2c_arm=on
    dtparam=spi=on
    dtoverlay=tft35a:rotate=90

  • download https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show/raw/master/usr/tft35a-overlay.dtb as /boot/efi/overlays/tft35a.dtbo

  • add “fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:ProFont6x11” at the end of /boot/efi/cmdline.txt

Yet to try the touchscreen nor X, but at least some progress.

1 Like