Last December, I purchased a Tontec 480×320 touchscreen display for use with a Raspberry Pi. Complete with case (amazon link). I bought it along with a Raspberry Pi Model B in order to play with software-defined radio (SDR), motivated by the FreqShow example at Adafruit. In fact, I wanted to get this example working.
But the display sold by Adafruit is not the display I bought, and I found a lot of online questions trying to get the Tontec display working with Raspberry Pi. X windows applications worked, but the pygame library returned errors, and I tracked it down to the ability of the distribution I had installed to work with the graphics (not X windows) mode.
After several hours and lots of installs and reinstalls, the following two steps worked to get the Tontec display working. Note that this was as of December 2015, and maybe jessie has changed by now.
- do not install the display yet – get the Raspberry Pi up and running … and
- do not use the jessie distribution of Raspian — downgrade to wheezy and install
- after doing this, download this updated set of installation instructions for the TFT display
Now the instructions of the example at Adafruit work. I tried taking a short-cut and installing rtl-sdr from a package using apt-get — it did not work quite right. The instructions on adafruit (download and compile from github) worked.
Tip: I don’t like the Pi automatically booting into X windows. It is annoying. You can disable it with sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service. If you want to manually get X windows started, you can always run /etc/init.d/lightdm (start | stop) to do so.