ST7789/FBTFT woes

[nobuddy2012]

Hello all --

I've been searching Google up and down and I can't seem to find what I'm looking for. The other day I grabbed a 1.54" 240x240 display -- not the one with the Raspi headers but the one that has the pins exposed inline -- and I figured I could get it to work with the existing kernel driver provided for the 1.3" display with the Raspi plug, since they both use the same display controller. I've gotten it to work minimally using the Adafruit Python script installer and a few modifications to said script (I'm using Ubuntu, and the /boot directory has a slightly different structure than Raspberry Pi OS).

There's two issues here: first is when I get the Pi to talk to the display, it's only because I used the Adafruit Python installer script. Everything is garbled. It's as if the framebuffer is not "aligned" with the pixels on the display, so to speak (additionally, the colors are inverted but I'll deal with that once I can get an image to display properly). Second is when I don't use the Adafruit installer and attempt to use the fbtft driver from the kernel, the display does not respond and I do not see a new framebuffer appear in /dev.

Has anyone gotten this particular ST7789 display to work using the fbtft kernel staging drivers? From what I've seen in the Raspi, Linus Torvalds, and "official" kernel repositories, the drivers are there, and they exist for ST7789v (I'm hoping the "v" isn't a significant variant here) but after rebuilding the kernel and trying the above I'm still at a loss.

Thanks in advance.