Mini TFT Display

The Adafruit Mini PiTFT - 135x240 Color TFT Add-on for Raspberry Pi is a tiny full color display for the Raspberry Pi, about the size of a postage stamp.

This does require a bit of installation; it doesn't work out of the box, see Adafruit Mini PiTFT - 135x240 Color TFT Add-on for Raspberry Pi Guide

Compatibility with Current Pi Kernels#

It turns out the current Python library support for the Adafruit PiTFT displays doesn't work with the 2021-era linux kernels.

The solution is to "pin" the kernel version back to 1.20201126-1. This is described in the Adafruit Forum

• Mini Pi TFT 1.14" and 2.0" 320x240 Color IPS TFT both gone d

which is further described at:

• Kernel Module Troubleshooting

Pinout#

• 5.0V - Connected to the display backlight
• 3.3V - Connected to the display power and also the STEMMA QT / Qwiic connector
• GND - Ground for everything
• SDA & SCL - I2C data for the STEMMA QT / Qwiic connector. Not used by buttons or display
• GPIO22 - Used to turn the backlight on and off. If you never want to turn the backlight off, cut the small jumper on the bottom of the PiTFT to free up GPIO22
• GPIO23 & GPIO24 - Connected to the two front buttons. These pins have 10K pullups to 3.3V so when the button is pressed, you will read a LOW voltage on these pins
• SCK, MOSI, CE0 & GPIO25 - These are the display control pins. Note that MISO is not connected even though it is a SPI pin because you cannot read back from the display.

Links#

• Mini PiTFT - 135x240 Color TFT on AdaFruit