elegoo tft lcd library factory

ALL THE CODES AND LIBRARIES THAT ELEGOO USED IN THE FILES ARE CREATED BY ADAFRUIT AND WE REALLY APPRECIATE ALL THE CONTRIBUTION THAT ADAFRUIT HAS MADE TO THE MAKER COMMUNITY.

So I bought myself another one of the Elegoo 2.8″ touchscreen LCD modules recently, and decided to have a deeper dive into the code. I looked through the examples and I thought “This looks very similar to code from Adafruit.”

You can download the original “tutorial” files from Elegoo directly at https://www.elegoo.com/pages/arduino-kits-support-files if you’d like to take a look for yourself.

The code was the same. The Elegoo_GFX library was an exact copy of the Adafruit GFX library, just with a global find and replace “Adafruit” for Elegoo. You can test this by changing the library definition in the code to use the Adafruit one and everything will still work.

It took me the best part of an afternoon to finally figure out exactly how it worked. They have only made (from what I can tell) a single change to the library under definitions for the Arduino Mega 2560 in the code.

The only other changes you need to make to your code are when you start the tft.begin, you need to specify a fixed identifier, for example the following code (based on the graphicstest example)

I’m waiting for Amazon to publish my product review, as I think this a totally unfair use of Adafruit’s source code and quite a clear ethical violation of the ethos of open source code. They could have easily forked the library and added their changes… Maybe it would have even been accepted up stream if people would find using similar displays with the Adafruit library on the Mega 2650.

You don’t have to do any library edits like above, other than defining #define SPI_DRIVER_SELECT 2 within SdFatConfig.h (in your libraries folder), then you can put your 24bit BMP images on your SD card and load them when using this module without any of the massive amount of effort I went through today