About Chuck

Chuck enjoys electronics, coffee, cycling, skiing and scotch, not necessarily in that order. By day Chuck works trying remove bloat-ware from satellite set top boxes. By night he is an embedded software and hardware developer.

Playing with SPI lcd drivers.

Over the last little while I’ve been wanting to build a tiny MAME cabinet. I had a Raspi sitting around, and bought a few little LCDs recently on e-bay. So over the last few days I’ve been getting my Linux chops back and cross compiled up a Linux framebuffer driver for this little spi display. It is 320×200, and uses the ILI9341 in 8-bit spi mode (i.e. is has s D/C line). After a bunch of digging I came upon the notro’s drivers (here). After setting up a ubuntu vm on my mac, I got these drivers to cross-compile. I was surprised how slow a linux kernel build is these days.

Here is my raspberry pi in a custom case, running the compiled in framebuffer driver.
I’ve tried getting advmame running.

With a little box like this, there are a whole bunch of possibilities for things to do with it.

Mini Mame
MPD server and client running on the display, with web interface for control
Shairport server

 

Raspberry Pi w/SPI LCD

Raspberry Pi w/SPI LCD

 

 

RPi booting

RPi booting