Build Instructions

Collapse

• 1

  Step 1 — Gather the hardware

  Full list with notes is in the Components section. The minimum to get a working panel: Pi 5, the 3.5" ILI9486 screen, a 27W USB-C supply, an active cooler, and a decent microSD. The ALFA, CAN dongle, and SDR are all optional — their tiles simply don't appear until they're plugged in.

  Do not skimp on the power supply. An underpowered Pi 5 with dongles attached produces intermittent faults you will spend a day blaming on software.

• 2

  Step 2 — Flash Kali and get in over SSH

  Write the Kali Raspberry Pi image to the microSD, enable SSH, and boot the Pi with a network cable and no screen attached. Everything from here is done over SSH — the panel isn't alive yet.

  Update before you touch anything else:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

• 3

  Step 3 — Bring up the panel

  This is the step that eats afternoons, so it's deliberately minimal. Two lines in /boot/firmware/config.txt:

  dtparam=spi=on
  dtoverlay=piscreen,drm,rotate=90

  Reboot. That's the entire display configuration.

  rotate is the only display setting that requires a reboot — pick 90 or 270 depending on which way up your case holds the panel. Touch orientation is handled in software, so you never come back to this file to fix taps landing in the wrong place.

  Verify the framebuffer exists:

  ls -l /dev/fb0
  cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/name

  You should see the ILI9486 DRM framebuffer. If /dev/fb0 is missing, stop here — nothing downstream will work.

View all 10 instructions