How to enable 7inch LCD on Pine64

Troubleshooting
1

I seem can’t enable the LCD with touch screen on my Pine A64 (both are from their first Kickstarter run) running DietPi latest 9.9.0 version. It worked without problem on Armbian (just adding pine64_lcd=on to configEnv.txt and gt9xxf_ts to /etc/modules), but this seem not working in DietPi. Any advise?

2

What exactly have you tried?

3

Hi @Jappe , thanks for your response.
In no particular order and with different combinations here are what I’ve tried:

  • added pine_lcd=on to dietpiEnv.txt
  • added gt9xxf_ts to /etc/modules (this should be a touchscreen driver?)
  • overlays=sun50i-a64-pine64-7inch-lcd.dtbo in dietpiEnv.txt, with and without dtbo at the end
  • dtoverlay=sun50i-a64-pine64-7inch-lcd.dtbo in ditepiEnv, with and without dtbo at the end

For the two last: I’ve found the sun50i-a64-pine64-7inch-lcd.dtbo file under /boot/dtb-6.6.44-current-sunxi64/allwinner/overlay folder - should I copy it somewhere?..

4

I try to add pine_lcd=on on dietpiEnv.txt but nothing happens, insert the module @ngmacha write in reply but nothing. Do you have some news because I need to configure this on 3 pine.

5

Were you able to make it work? I am still struggling, nothing works…

6

@MichaIng has maybe an idea

7

Probably this was working with the vendor kernel images from PINE64 themselves. Please carefully revert everything you tried, also remove gt9xxf_ts from /etc/modules.

On Armbian and DietPi, there is a device tree overlay for this indeed, here is how to enable them in general:

  • Find the overlay /boot/dtb/allwinner/overlay/sun50i-a64-pine64-7inch-lcd.dtbo, and generally overlays in this directory.
  • On PINE A64, in /boot/dietpiEnv.txt, you will find overlay_prefix=sun50i-a64, which means that you can use overlays whose file names start with this prefix.
  • Add them to the overlays= line, which exists already, without the prefix, and without the file extension. In this case:
    overlays=pine64-7inch-lcd
    Multiple overlays can be added, separated by space, no comma, no quotation or anything.

Generally, to check whether a driver even exists, use modinfo, in this case:

modinfo gt9xxf_ts

It will probably tell you that it could not be found, since it is a vendor kernel module. In any case, even if it does exist, it is almost never needed to manually load kernel modules/drivers: the device tree, including overlays you may have added, imply this. They contain nodes for each device, which contain compatible properties like in this case compatible = "goodix,gt911"; in the node for the touchscreen, and compatible = "feiyang,fy07024di26a30d"; in the one for the LCD. Those tell the kernel which drivers to load. You can check back with lsmod which one was used in particular.

There is also a backlight node. Hence check back dietpi-config > display options > brightness where you should be able to control the backlight panel brightness of the LCD.

8

Hello @MichaIng

I was looking for the solution, unsuccessfully, for so long, that the display has been removed and thrown to the drawer long time ago. Yesterday I’ve taken it out and tried to strap to the Pine running my Home Assistant, unfortunately it slipped out of my hand, tearing off the flex-connector :frowning: (from the very beginning the way to connect this LCD felt very flimsy and not reliable).
Sadly, this was the only LCD I have left, I can’t know now if your solution works. Maybe @HL3D may test and let us know… But I can confirm that lsmod shows two drivers loaded:

panel_feyyang_fy07024di26a30d

and

goodix_ts

The bright side of all this is now I have no reason not to run DietPi on my Pines!!
Anyway, thank you very much!!

9

I am sorry to hear that. I hope there was nothing important you used the LCD for.