This guide will show you how to setup and configure your Pi hole to display the pi hole system status and ads blocked using the Pi Supply Media Center HAT. The Pi Supply Media Center HAT is a 2.8″ TFT display that connects to your Raspberry Pi, and includes other feature such as IR receiver, restive touch and navigation buttons that can be soldered to the PCB.
Step 4 – Install the Media Center HAT software. We want to display the main output on the TFT display only, from the command line type in the following:
This requires installing PADD (Pi-hole Ad Detection Display) and Pi-Hole on the Adafruit 2.8" PiTFT Plus to display useful and fun statistics such as Amount of Pi-holed Advertisements,and the top offending domain attempting to serve pesky advertisements to your network.
PiTFT Plus Assembled 320x240 2.8" TFT - one of the cutest little display for the Raspberry Pi. It features a 2.8" display with 320x240 16-bit color pixels and a resistive touch overlay.
Follow the steps as displayed on the 1 & 2 reference Images for connecting to the Raspberry Pi Remote Shell. Proceed to the below Steps to configure the Pi-TFT Display.
sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Raspbe...> >pitft-fbcp.sh
After installing PiHole, if it"s really saving your bandwidth and improving network performance. I would greatly appreciate if possible you could give a donation to help them to continue to develop, provide support and give back to the community.
this is the latest version of the first and original TFT touch panel display board designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi. This hardware version is compatible for all 40-way GPIO Pi"s, so that is the A+, the B+ and the latest Pi 2B and uses the established HY28B display board which features a resolution of 320 x 240 at 65k colours. As usual the display utilises the excellent fbtft drivers authored by notro, only now those drivers are included in the very latest raspbian image, although not currently included in the image available from the foundations download page. I expect this to change in the very near future so that the rpi-update step is no longer required.
It is recommended to use the latest raspbian image , at the time of posting is dated 2015-02-16, to configure using an SSH session remotely, with no TV/Monitor connected to the HDMI port, and to connect the 2.8" Display board right from the start prior to connecting power to the Pi.
I purchased this kit for the Raspberry Pi, the LCD screen just connects to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. It has a Adafruit LCD screen and a case for my Raspberry Pi 3B+
When my Samsung SD card died I had to re-setup a new SD card but the IP address came across as the mac address stayed the same (as it was the same hardware), I did, however, change the name of the Static IP hostname in my home router to match the new name “raspberrypihole” (not “pihole”)
Before I add computers on my network to the PiHole I had better uninstall the nextdns.io (my blog post about NextDNS.io here) as the Pi will now be the main DNS blocking Sinkhole in our house.
After 20 hours or rining computers through the Pi-Hole Admin interface I loaded the PiHole Admin Interface (at http://192.168.0.201/admin/index.php) was reporting stats.
2 Guide Contents Guide Contents Overview What"s Pi-hole? Parts PiTFT Display PiTFT Plus 480x " TFT+Touchscreen for Raspberry Pi Other Parts Adafruit Raspberry Pi B+ / Pi 2 / Pi 3 Case - Smoke Base USB MicroSD Card Reader/Writer - microsd / microsdhc / microsdxc Raspberry Pi Setup Install Pi Hole Pre-Check Change Hostname Run Pi Hole Installer Configuration Test Admin Page Test Blocking PiTFT Configuration Assembly PiTFT Configuration Install PADD Open PADD at Pi Bootup Turn off the PiTFT at Night Using PADD and Pi Hole Configure and Test Ad Blocking Router Configuration for Pi-Hole Updating PADD Adafruit Industries Page 2 of 27
3 Overview We already have a guide on using Pi-Hole with the Raspberry Pi Zero W ( to send advertisements on your network into a black hole. But, the PiOLED is small and we want to monitor more statistics at a glance. While we could open the web console to monitor Pi-hole, we can"t show that to friends easily. Plus, who doesn"t want more shiny, blinky, networking hardware? We"re going to install PADD ( (Pi-hole Ad Detection Display) and Pi-Hole ( on the Adafruit 3.5" PiTFT Plus to display useful and fun statistics such as Amount of Pi-holed Advertisements, and the top offending domain attempting to serve pesky advertisements to your network. What"s Pi-hole? Pi-hole ( is an open-source project which let"s your Pi act as a DNS (Domain Name Server). While you may have an ad-blocker installed on your browser, do you have one on your phone? What about blocking inapplication advertisements in your mobile games? On your Smart TV? On your smart fridge? Pi-hole lets you block ads from any device configured to use it as a Domain Name Server. When an advertisement (i.e: ads.adserver.com) tries to resolve it"s IP address, Pi-hole will return nothing back. You"ll never connect to the advertisement server and the ad won"t even load. This makes it quicker, faster, and use less data than conventional ad blockers. Parts You"ll need the following parts to get up-and-running with Pi-hole and PADD Adafruit Industries Page 3 of 27
4 You need a Raspberry Pi with built in wireless. The Raspberry Pi 3 line (3, 3 B, 3 B+) devices are wireless-ready without external configuration: 1 x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B GHz Cortex-A53 with 1GB RAM ADD TO CART You"ll also need a power supply for your Pi and a MicroSD card for holding the Pi"s OS and it"s applications: 1 x 5V 2.4A Power Supply 5V 2.4A Switching Power Supply with 20AWG MicroUSB Cable ADD TO CART 1 x 8GB MicroSD Card 8GB Class 10 SD/MicroSD Memory Card - SD Adapter Included ADD TO CART PiTFT Display To use the full version of PADD, you"ll need a PiTFT supporting a resolution of at least 480x320. If you"re using a display smaller than 480x320, PADD will boot into a mini mode which displays way less statistics about the network. To view PADD, we suggest using the PiTFT Plus 3.5": PiTFT Plus 480x " TFT+Touchscreen for Raspberry Pi $44.95 IN STOCK ADD TO CART If you happen to have one of our 2.8" or 2.4" PiTFT ( those will work too Other Parts We used a Pi 3 case to protect our Pi from aesthetics and to protect our Pi against scratches, bumps, and falls. The case also makes the Pi-hole look like a networking appliance. Adafruit Industries Page 4 of 27
15 PiTFT Configuration Assembly If you are using a case like the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Case ( snap-fit the Pi into the case: Leave the clear top off, we"ll need to access the GPIO header for the PiTFT. The PiTFT"s four mounting ears can be used to attach the display to a bezel. But, we"ll be snapping them off with pliers (they"re perforated) for a flush-fit with the case/ Adafruit Industries Page 15 of 27
16 Position the PiTFT over the 2x20 GPIO connector and press downwards. Make sure the PiTFT"s header is flush against the GPIO header. Now that our PiTFT is assembled, let"s configure the display to work with our Pi. Adafruit Industries Page 16 of 27
17 PiTFT Configuration You"ll need to perform some configuration to get the PiTFT up and running. We"ll do this through the PiTFT installer script. This script will do all the work for you, and install both device tree overlay support as well as configure rotation and any HDMI mirroring. PiTFT no longer needs any custom kernels or modules, so you can continue to update/upgrade your Pi and it will work with the most recent releases. Here"s the commands to run. Make sure your Pi has network access, it needs to download the software! cd ~ wget chmod +x adafruit-pitft.sh sudo./adafruit-pitft.sh Adafruit Industries Page 17 of 27
18 Once./adafruit-pitft.sh is run, we"ll be presented with menus. Since we"re using the 3.5" PiTFt, we"ll select #4 We"ll also need to select a rotation of 270 degrees (#3) so the PiTFT + case can sit on your desk when the USB cable is plugged in. We"re going to want to use the PiTFT as a text console for PADD, type Yes to the question Would you like the console to appear on the PiTFT display Adafruit Industries Page 18 of 27
20 Install PADD Next we"re going to install PADD ( the Pi-hole Ad Detection Display. This application displays statistics about advertisements, your Pi"s status, network configuration and system statistics on your PiTFT. It is written and maintained by Jim McKenna who did an awesome job! ( In the SSH session with your Pi, navigate to your home directory: cd ~ Grab a copy of PADD: wget -N Make PADD executable by running: sudo chmod +x padd.sh Open PADD at Pi Bootup Next, we"re going to set PADD to open automatically on your PiTFT when we start our Pi. Open ~/.bashrc : nano ~/.bashrc Navigate to the end of the file (by pressing the down arrow key) and add the following text: Adafruit Industries Page 20 of 27
21 # Run PADD # If we"re on the PiTFT screen (ssh is xterm) if [ "$TERM" == "linux" ] ; then while : do./padd.sh sleep 1 done fi Save (control+o) the configuration and exit (control+x) nano to be brought back to the terminal. Turn off the PiTFT at Night The PiTFT is bright and doesn"t need to be powered-on at night, so let"s put it to sleep until we wake up. Edit cron as root: sudo crontab -e Select nano as an editor by pressing the 2 key. Adafruit Industries Page 21 of 27
22 Scroll beneath the commented text (#) and enter the following: # PADD Sleep # Turn off the PiTFT+ at midnight * * * sh -c "echo "0" > /sys/class/backlight/soc\:backlight/brightness" # Turn on the PiTFT+ at 8:00 am * * * sh -c "echo "1" > /sys/class/backlight/soc\:backlight/brightness" Save (control+o) the configuration and exit (control+x) nano to be brought back to the terminal. Reboot the Pi to apply the new changes by running: sudo reboot When your Pi reboots, the TFT should boot into PADD: Adafruit Industries Page 22 of 27
the github LCD_Show script works well enough to get this LCD working on the Raspberry Pi 4 using the latest (at the time of this writing) release named Buster... what is not configured is the touchscreen coordinates, nor a very important configuration: right-click on a touchscreen...
- install the xinput-calibrator package, then run the program from either the desktop menu (Preferences) or from the command line of a terminal window; You"ll be shown a graphical screen, and asked to pen touch four different points on the display. When done you"ll be presented with a line of values representing your LCD"s touch boundaries, such as: "258 3966 3774 226" - Enter these values (as root) into the file 99-calibration.conf under the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory, then reboot your RPi to enjoy more accuracy
Ms.Josey 
Ms.Josey