Overview Link to heading

The audience for this guide is for beginner, but not an absolute beginner: This guide assumes that you are familiar with the following:

Software Basic terminal usage, including using a text editor and installing software through apt. Hardware Basic understanding of interfacing with Raspberry Pi gpio.

A good place to start with Raspberry Pi is by using the imager.

This should work on any raspberry pi. I only tested with a 4B and Zero 2 W. For this guide I used the latter.

This was my software setup:

         _,met$$$$$gg.           user@pi
      ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.        OS: Debian 12 bookworm
    ,g$$P""       """Y$$.".      Kernel: aarch64 Linux 6.6.51+rpt-rpi-v8
   ,$$P'              `$$$.      Uptime: 12h 33m
  ',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:    Packages: 1594
  `d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$     Shell: bash 5.2.15
   $$P      d$'     ,    $$P     Disk: 5.4G / 15G (39%)
   $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'     CPU: ARM Cortex-A53 @ 4x 1GHz
   $$\;      Y$b._   _,d$P'      RAM: 137MiB / 416MiB
   Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'
   `$$b      "-.__
    `Y$$
     `Y$$.
       `$$b.
         `Y$$b.
            `"Y$b._
                `""""

Requirements Link to heading

  • Raspberry Pi running rasbian.
  • SSD1351 controlled screen
  • Wires

Setup Link to heading

Connect the Display Link to heading

  1. Wire the SSD1351 SPI header to spi bus 0 on the raspberry pi as shown below:

alt

Add Device Tree Overlay Link to heading

  1. Open a terminal from the rasbian desktop or ssh into your raspberry pi.
  2. Add the device tree overlay entry
echo "dtoverlay=ssd1351-spi,spi0-0,dc_pin=25,reset_pin=24" | \
sudo tee -a /boot/firmware/config.txt

(or use your favorite text editor)

  1. Reboot
sudo reboot
  1. After rebooting open another terminal and verify /dev/fb0 exists:
ls /dev/fb0

🔴 If you see an error you did something wrong, double check all steps.

Conclusion Link to heading

That’s it! If you’d like I got into how to interact with the framebuffer device in the next post. Otherwise, have a good one.