Review on 📺 Adafruit PiTFT 2.2-inch HAT Mini Kit - 320x240 2.2-inch TFT Display - No Touch by Joshua Vogel

This display is very cool. It fits perfectly on my Raspberry Pi 2 B model. Adafruit has its own image with built-in screen support, so all you have to do is write that image to an SD card and boot directly to the screen with the console output. Pretty cool. I connected a USB keyboard and was able to set up the Pi and run shell commands like "ifconfig". The screen is a bit narrow, about 40 characters I think, but you can still do useful console work with it. I like it because it's nice to get a console if/when you've got your ethernet set up wrong or you've forgotten what static IP you set up or you just want to know if your Pi is alive and kicking. and I hate the need to hook up an external HDMI monitor. The header is unsoldered so you can replace the stack header if you have one (Adafruit sells them). It comes with a mismatched header. Personally, I prefer the stack header as it preserves the pi's GPIO pinout. Remember that soldering a 2x20 connector requires some skill and a decent quality soldering iron. It's not hard science, but it probably shouldn't be your first foray into soldering. Note that multiple GPIO pins are used, mainly the SPI port - MOSI, MISO, CE0, SCLK and GPIO25. The literature says that CE1 is also used, but that's not clear to me from the schematic. The diagram shows that the buttons are connected to GPIO 17, 27, 23, 22. I personally haven't tried the buttons yet. I was able to put mine, folded on a Pi, in one of the clear plastic sleeves sold here at Revain. It looks good and gives me a self-contained prototyping environment.