This means that I have full support for the wifi chips I needed to use and really early activation of the fbtft screen (good for seeing if there are any boot time errors).
In the end i used the following process.
(note some extracts taken verbatim from notro's site)
Install rpi-update
rpi-update is used to install this kernel.
It must have REPO_URI support (auto updating doesn't work, since it overwrites the REPO_URI variable):
sudo wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update
Raspian: Remember to expand the filesystem if you haven't done so
sudo raspi-config
Raspian: Remember to enable SPI if needed
# remove or comment out the spi blacklist line
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf
Install the kernel
FBTFT drivers built into the kernel proper
sudo REPO_URI=https://github.com/notro/rpi-firmware BRANCH=builtin rpi-update
sudo reboot
edit /etc/modules
and add/uncoment the following lines
spi-bcm2708 i2c-bcm2708 i2c-dev stmpe_device cs=1 chip=stmpe610 blocks=gpio,ts irq-pullup irq-gpio=24 irq-base=330 sample-time=4 mod-12b=1 ref-sel=0 adc-freq=2 ave-ctrl=3 touch-det-delay=4 settling=2 fraction-z=7 i-drive=0 gpio_backlight_device gpio=252
and add the following
fbtft_device.name=pitft fbtft_device.rotate=270 fbtft_device.speed=48000000 fbtft_device.fps=50 fbtft_device.debug=0 fbtft_device.verbose=0 fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:8x8
Configure touchscreen
this can be done by using the Adafruit guide at their site so I won't reiterate it here.
Controlling the backlight
# Turn off backlight
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/*/bl_power
# Turn on backlight
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/*/bl_power
Brightness is currently not supported (need a kernel PWM driver for the Raspberry Pi).
Wiring Pi can be used to dim the backlight.
gpio -g mode 18 pwm
gpio -g pwm 18 1023
and that's it.
hopefully this will give you the necessary pointers to get this up and running for yourself
