The Adafruit DPI TFT Kippah for Raspberry Pi takes advantage of a little known function of the Pi which is its ability to drive TFT screens natively. The normal route to adding a small display to the Pi is to feed its HDMI signal into a HDMI to TFT decoder. The native method is better than using an HDMI decoder as it uses less power and it's cheaper but it still benefits from hardware acceleration. It's fast, cheap and compact, so what's the catch? Well, the catch is that it uses a lot of GPIO pins, in fact all but 5 of them, which is fine if you want to make Pi laptop or kiosk display for example. Pins 22 to 27 are still available. There are no PWM pins available for precision backlight control but there are solder jumpers to give you a selection of preset brightnesses.
The board also supports touch screens which appear to the operating system as a mouse with the usual actions such as click, double click and click and drag. The touch information is output to a micro-USB socket which you can connect to one of the Pi's USB inputs.
Supplied as a fully assembled and tested TFT interface. Adafruit provide a free tutorial to help you get your TFT screen up and running with the latest Raspbian operating system.
The TFT interface adheres to all the Raspberry Pi Foundation's specification for a HAT with the exception of the EEPROM. Because the TFT functions on the Pi are hardwired, the pins to interface to the EEPROM weren't available hence Adafruit don't call it a HAT, which seems reasonable. Instead they decided to call it a kippah because it's a covering much like a hat.
- Native TFT interface for Raspberry Pi
- Cheaper and less power hungry than the equivalent HDMI solution
- 18-bit RGB colour
- Touchscreen support
- Adafruit part no.: 2453
*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.
*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.
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