esp8266 2.4 tft lcd quotation

In the previous article (“WiFi OLED Mini Weather Station with ESP8266“) I have used the OLED kit from https://blog.squix.org. And as promised, this time it is about the “ESP8266 WiFi Color Display Kit”:

I had ordered both because I thought that the Color Display kit is needs the other kit as a base. Well, it turned out that both kits work independently. My bad. Actually this is good, as I have now two independent ESP8266 weather stations :-). An addition to that, they can exchange data (e.g. temperature/humidity) with a server, so that makes them a perfect dual weather station.

Example code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-weather-station-color). The code is very well documented I had no issues to make all the needed configuration (WiFi SSID and connection settings). After a few  hours I had the ESP8266 weather station up and running in the first prototype of the enclosure:

After a few hours, I have now my second ESP8266 WiFi weather station with touch LCD. It is not looking good and I very much enjoy it. The design is available on Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2527282).

You have an 8-bit parallel interface TFT display. It requires 13 GPIO pins - D0-D7 plus reset, chip select, read, write and register select. You can forego the "read" signal and tie it high to save a pin. You can probably do the same with the reset signal, meaning you need a minimum of 11 pins.

The ILI9341 TFT module contains a display controller with the same name: ILI9341. It’s a color display that uses SPI interface protocol and requires 4 or 5 control pins, it’s low cost and easy to use.

The resolution of this TFT display is 240 x 320 which means it has 76800 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (not 5V tolerant).

The ILI9341 TFT display board which is shown in project circuit diagram has 14 pins, the first 9 pins are for the display and the other 5 pins are for the touch module.

Pins D5 (GPIO14) and D7 (GPIO13) are hardware SPI module pins of the ESP8266EX microcontroller respectively for SCK (serial clock) and MOSI (master-out slave-in).

The first library is a driver for the ILI9341 TFT display which can be installed from Arduino IDE library manager (Sketch —> Include Library —> Manage Libraries …, in the search box write “ili9341” and choose the one from Adafruit).

The ILI9341 TFT display is connected to NodeMCU hardware SPI module pins (clock and data), the other pins which are: CS (chip select), RST (reset) and DC (data/command) are defined as shown below:

In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.

Here’s the circuit schematic. We will use the GND pin, the digital pins from 8 to 13, as well as the pin number 14. As the 5V pins are already used by the TFT Screen I will use the pin number 13 as VCC, by setting it right away high in the setup section of code.

I will use the UTFT and URTouch libraries made by Henning Karlsen. Here I would like to say thanks to him for the incredible work he has done. The libraries enable really easy use of the TFT Screens, and they work with many different TFT screens sizes, shields and controllers. You can download these libraries from his website, RinkyDinkElectronics.com and also find a lot of demo examples and detailed documentation of how to use them.

After we include the libraries we need to create UTFT and URTouch objects. The parameters of these objects depends on the model of the TFT Screen and Shield and these details can be also found in the documentation of the libraries.

So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels  down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.

Displaying a custom image or graphic on a LCD display is a very useful task as displays are now a premium way of providing feedback to users on any project. With this functionality, we can build projects that display our own logo, or display images that help users better understand a particular task the project is performing, providing an all-round improved User Experience (UX) for your Arduino or ESP8266 based project. Today’s tutorial will focus on how you can display graphics on most Arduino compatible displays.

The procedure described in this tutorial works with all color displays supported by Adafruit’s GFX library and also works for displays supported by the TFTLCD library from Adafruit with little modification. Some of the displays on which this procedure works include:

For this tutorial, we will use the 2.8″ ILI9325 TFT Display which offers a resolution of 320 x 340 pixels and we will display a bitmap image of a car.

To demonstrate how things work, we will use the 2.8″ TFT Display. The 2.8″ TFT display comes as a shield which plugs directly into the Arduino UNO as shown in the image below.

Image2Code is an easy-to-use, small Java utility to convert images into a byte array that can be used as a bitmap on displays that are compatible with the Adafruit-GFX or Adafruit TFTLCD (with little modification) library.

To reduce the amount of code, and stress involved in displaying the graphics, we will use two wonderful libraries; The GFX library and the TFTLCD library from Adafruit.

As usual, we start writing the sketch by including the libraries required. For this procedure, we will use the TFTLCD library alone, since we are assuming you are using a display that is not supported by the GFX library.

The last section of the code is the drawBitmap function itself, as earlier mentioned, to use the drawbitmap() function with the Adafruit TFTLCD library, we need to copy the function’s code and paste into the Arduino sketch.

Reader [Jasper] writes in with glowing praise for the TFT_eSPI library for the ESP8266 and the various cheap 480x320 TFT displays (ILI9341, ILI9163, ST7735, S6D02A1, etc.) that…

ILI9341 is a 262,144-color single-chip SOC driver for a-TFT liquid crystal display with resolution of 240RGBx320 dots, comprising a 720-channel source driver, a 320-channel gate driver, 172,800 bytes GRAM for graphic display data of 240RGBx320 dots, and power supply circuit. ILI9341 supports parallel 8-/9-/16-/18-bit data bus MCU interface, 6-/16-/18-bit data bus RGB interface and 3-/4-line serial peripheral interface (SPI). The moving picture area can be specified in internal GRAM by window address function. The specified window area can be updated selectively, so that moving picture can be displayed simultaneously independent of still picture area.

You can find ILI9341-based TFT displays in various sizes on eBay and Aliexpress. The one I chose for this tutorial is 2.2″ length along the diagonal, 240×320 pixels resolution, supports SPI interface, and can be purchased for less than $10.

Note that we will be using the hardware SPI module of the ESP8266 to drive the TFT LCD. The SPI communication pins are multiplexed with I/O pins D5 (SCK), D6 (MISO), and D7 (MOSI). The chip select (CS) and Data/Command (DC) signal lines are configurable through software.

For ILI9341-based TFT displays, there are some options for choosing the library for your application. The most common one is using Bodmer. We will use this library in this tutorial. So go ahead and download the

The library contains proportional fonts, different sizes can be enabled/disabled at compile time to optimise the use of FLASH memory. The library has been tested with the NodeMCU (ESP8266 based).

The library is based on the Adafruit GFX and Adafruit ILI9341 libraries and the aim is to retain compatibility. Significant additions have been made to the library to boost the speed for ESP8266 processors (it is typically 3 to 10 times faster) and to add new features. The new graphics functions include different size proportional fonts and formatting features. There are a significant number of example sketches to demonstrate the different features.

Configuration of the library font selections, pins used to interface with the TFT and other features is made by editting the User_Setup.h file in the library folder. Fonts and features can easily be disabled by commenting out lines.

Now you are all set to try out tons of really cool built-in examples that come with the library. The following output corresponds to the TFT_Pie_Chart example.

My favorite example is TFT terminal, which implements a simple “Arduino IDE Serial Monitor” like serial receive terminal for monitoring debugging messages from another Arduino or ESP8266 board.