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PiTFT Touchscreen, Pygame, Raspbian Jessie issues

Friday 11 December 2015

Anybody had problems with Pygame on PiTFT on Raspbian Jessie? No? Well on Raspbian Jessie Pygame apparently works normally, except that the PiTFT touchscreen mouse doesnt work properly on Pygame. If you touch the touchscreen in the same spot a few times, you would find that the cursor just moves around randomly. That may have only been for my code, but apparently others are also having the same problems. Like in https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=76169.

How do we fix the problem? If you are a Linux noob like me, I found some commands that will help

Works as of 11/12/2015:

sudo apt-get install libsmpeg0

cd /tmp

wget http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/libs/libsdl1.2/libsdl1.2debian_1.2.15-5_armhf.deb

sudo dpkg -i libsdl1.2debian_1.2.15-5_armhf.deb

wget http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/p/pygame/python-pygame_1.9.1release+dfsg-10_armhf.deb

sudo dpkg -i python-pygame_1.9.1release+dfsg-10_armhf.deb

I'm not very sure whether some of these downgrading commands are redundant, so it would be nice if  you can comment if you think so.

Basically, There have been some problems with SDL or Pygame, so I downgraded these packages.

That's all. Thanks for reading.

Rotate Pitft Display without rebooting

Saturday 27 June 2015

PiTFTs are awesome! But, to rotate the display you still need to modify the configuration files and reboot. I searched on the Internet for a while and I could not find a way to rotate the display on the fly without rebooting, until now.

Works as of 25/6/15

Just type these commands to rotate the display:

sudo rmmod  fb_ili9340

sudo rmmod fbtft_device

sudo modprobe fbtft_device name=pitft rotate=90 #replace 90 with the rotation angles 0, 90, 180, 270

To recalibrate the touchscreen according to the rotation, just type this:

sudo adafruit-pitft-touch-cal -f

That's all. Thanks for reading.

How to install xmonad on a Raspberry Pi with Arch Linux ARM (Quickly)

Tuesday 11 November 2014

I got a Raspberry Pi and loved it, but i still could not figure out a quick and easy way to properly install Xmonad on Arch Linux ARM, until now. No, this does not require to cross compile xmonad on another computer, installing unneeded software and wasting storage space and time. Unfortunately, I was too lazy to install Xorg in the code below so install it manually yourself first.

So here is how i did it.

Copy the code below into your terminal.

pacman -S gmp libxinerama packer base-devel

packer -S dpkg

wget http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/x/xmonad/xmonad_0.11-9_armhf.deb

dpkg --force-depends -i xmonad_0.11-9_armhf.deb

rm xmonad_0.11-9_armhf.deb

This should work. That is all. Have Fun.