I recently purchased another TFT display, this one the capacitive variety for its better touch control. By Adafruit, it also includes four tactile buttons on the side. Today I'm attempting to get all this to work with the OctoPrint-TFT repository. At $45 it isn't cheap but having worked for a year on a printer with a resistive TFT I can say that the difference means everything.
The product is a pleasure to work with, Adafruit always includes good documentation and in this case, a script to handle the configuration. With little effort the resolution, orientation and touch configuration has been dealt with in five minutes.
The next step was to get OctoPrint-TFT installed. Even though it appears to be an attractive interface for a different-sized screen, it's just not usable with the 320x240 resolution of this one. There's a bit of a scrolling mechanism but it doesn't appear to work in all the screens, leaving you stranded and unable to reach the Back button. All this requires the Desktop (X System) to be installed as well as some other dependencies.
I did edit the underlying configuration file but that appears to only somewhat pay attention. If I did want to continue with this approach, I'd need to fork the repository and build the Go lang scripts (which I know). I'm just not convinced yet that I want to go that route.
I could go a different route, install the TouchUI plugin and then serve up a local browser on the Raspbian Desktop to the http://localhost instance. The plugin is supposed to recognize that it's on a small screen and then to style things for that. The Raspberry Pi 3B would likely have enough processing power to do all this. It's probably worth a try at least but it doesn't feel like a clean solution, to be honest.
