Redirecting console output to a PiTFT screen

I just got a neat 3.8″ PiTFT from Adafruit. Followed the easy setup instructions in the tutorial and it seems I can either startx and get an X Windows desktop on the device, or display the tty1 console to the device on boot.

The trouble with the easy setup is it’s not clear what the scripts actually configured to get it working.

For X Windows, it seems this is the relevant part:

export FRAMEBUFFER=/dev/fb1

startx

 

For the console on boot, adding this section to the line in /boot/cmdline.txt following rootwait:

fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:VGA8x8

The docs for fbcon here suggest that map:10 will map /dev/fb1 then /dev/fb0 in a repeating pattern across each tty, eg fb1 -> tty1, fb0 – > tty2, fb1 -> tty3 etc

The part I’m missing right now is how to switch the tty mappings on the fly, or how to map a specific  console the to the buffer. This post I think is asking similar questions to what I’m trying to do.

If I want to map output on tty2 to the fb for the PiTFT, I wonder if it would be like this:

fbcon=map:01

I’ll try it and see…