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I used a 2.8 TFT_LCD Touch Screen for displaying an image on the screen with arduino mega but the image didn"t display on the screen,although I change the " MEGA_SOFT_SPI " from 0 to 1 in the sd2card.h as they wrote in the top of this example.

I am messing around with TFT displays now and have been interested in my TFT displays bitmap function, however, it is very slow. when doing any other kind of colour printing/messages it is about as instantaneous as I"d expect, but when doing bitmaps it takes almost 30seconds to fully update the 320x480px screen.

I"m wondering if this is normal for this type of display and setup and if not then, how can I speed it up! Ideally I"d like to display simple animations!

I have a 1.44" TFT Graphic LCD screen like this one: 1.44" TFT Graphic LCD (128x128px) - Creatron Inc I need this small screen to fit in a project I am working on. I also have a micro SD card breakout board like this :https://www.creatroninc.com/product/microsd-breakout/

I have been able to get the screen working to run a graphics test but my ultimate goal is to, from the push of a button on my Arduino Uno, display one image on the screen, in landscape format.

I want to store the image on a micro SD card so I purchased the breakout board but I am confused as to how to wire it to the screen and the Uno I am using for experimenting.

I am fairly new to Arduino but I have built quite a few projects. I have never used a screen before though and have been thoroughly confused by the libraries needed to load images onto the screen. It seems straight forward, there are tutorials available but they seem to be out of date with the libraries that have changed and I have yet to be able to succeed with anything other than basic graphics.

I just want one image to appear. I didn"t imagine it would be so difficult. I am willing to keep trying but I could use a little help to make sure that I am wiring the SD card breakout correctly and with finding basic code that can work to display an image. Below is the first part of the code in an example I have been using to try to figure out the connections:

This display can be mounted on an Arduino Mega or Due. It has a fairly high resolution of 320*480 pixels and is also quite large with 3.5 inch LCD size.

Please let me know how to proceed. if you can give me an example code to display an image for the same, it would be of great help in understanding for me. i am completely new to arduino.

I recently purchased a 3.5 inch TFT shield for Arduino Mega (https://ebay.to/34yC6UQ) with the MEGA 2560 (https://ebay.to/3kBwcrr) to make a digital photo frame for my girlfriend, but I"ve been having trouble getting it to work. When I plug it in and try to run code, the screen stays white and does not change. After researching for a few hours, I was able to find that removing "&& USING_16BIT_BUS" from "#if defined(SUPPORT_1963) && USING_16BIT_BUS" in the MCUFRIEND_kbv.cpp file allowed me to display graphicstest_kbv on the TFT. I don"t have any other TFTs to display graphicstest_kbv on, so I"m not sure if it"s working properly, but it at least displays. It looks like the graphicstest code needs to have "ID = 0x9481" to function. I"m new to Arduino and all of these electronic components so I"m not great at troubleshooting yet, so any help is appreciated.

As of writing this, I"m trying to run mcufriend"s "showBMP_not_Uno" without much luck. The serial monitor states "cannot start SD" and the TFT displays half light blue and half grain (image attached below). I currently have 4 BMP images on the SD in the root directory. I"m going to try and go through the code and see why it"s not working, but I"d appreciate any help. Let me know if you need more information.

i read that the screen consumes a lot of power and i observed that arduino is more hot than it should, so i dont know if there is something i can do about it or it will damage it long term. i guess the best solution is to bypass the power pin and use external power supply with enough current available.

In this guide we’re going to show you how you can use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire the display, write text, draw shapes and display images on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT is a colorful display with 128 x 160 color pixels. The display can load images from an SD card – it has an SD card slot at the back. The following figure shows the screen front and back view.

This module uses SPI communication – see the wiring below . To control the display we’ll use the TFT library, which is already included with Arduino IDE 1.0.5 and later.

The TFT display communicates with the Arduino via SPI communication, so you need to include the SPI library on your code. We also use the TFT library to write and draw on the display.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT display can load images from the SD card. To read from the SD card you use the SD library, already included in the Arduino IDE software. Follow the next steps to display an image on the display:

Note: some people find issues with this display when trying to read from the SD card. We don’t know why that happens. In fact, we tested a couple of times and it worked well, and then, when we were about to record to show you the final result, the display didn’t recognized the SD card anymore – we’re not sure if it’s a problem with the SD card holder that doesn’t establish a proper connection with the SD card. However, we are sure these instructions work, because we’ve tested them.

In this guide we’ve shown you how to use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino: display text, draw shapes and display images. You can easily add a nice visual interface to your projects using this display.

Here we describe the following setups: 1. Arduino Uno with mounted on it a TFT display shield, 2. Arduino Nano with a separate SD card reader and driving the same (parallel) TFT display. Both combinations comfortably support a digital photo frame. The library MCUFRIEND_kbv.h (David Prentice) is required.

A TFT display offers in width, height, pixels and color depth an attractive medium to display pictures. The assemblies described here are capable of showing sequences of pictures stored on SD card. Most simple is to mount a TFT shield onto an Arduino Uno and, with the proper sketch, display images. The Arduino Uno or its little brother Nano can also be used in combination with with a separate SD card reader and a TFT display, for instance in situations where it is difficult if not impossible to reach the shields SD card reader. We have tested a selection of TFT displays. Some form of external data storage is always necessary with the original Arduinos because the internal memory of these microcontrollers is far too small to hold color image frames. The Arduino serves in a photo frame assembly as an engine that reads image files stored on SD card pixel for pixel and transfers them fast and in a proper way to the display. The result is that a digital photo frame can be created fast and with very modest means.

The idea of a shield is very simple and very clever: Just stick the device properly onto an Arduino UNO, insert the SD card loaded with pictures, upload a sketch and you’re in business. Let’s go through this procedure.

figure 1. Left: 3.5’ 320*480 pixel parallel TFT shield, front – a micro SD card sticks out of the SD card slot. Right: Arduino UNO. basically: just stick the shield onto the UNO, stick a micro SD card with picture files in the card reader slot, load the sketch and go!

Shields:The market supplies a range of shields between 2.4’ and 3.95’ display diagonal and with resolutions of 320*240 and 320*480. Display controllers are ILI9341, ILI9481, ILI9486 and ILI9488. This range of displays suits the purpose of creating a photo frame. My favorite photo frame display is a 3.5’ 320*480 display shield with ILI9481 controller. The MCUFRIEND_kbv.h library supports all these controllers.

SD card:The world of SD cards is rapidly changing. Some years ago all TFT displays on the market came equipped with a standard SD card slot, accepting cards with capacities in the MB range. Current SD card slots are in the micro format while the market is flooded with micro-SD cards with enormous capacities. At the same time ‘low-capacity’ SD cards are increasingly hard to get. The micro SD card used here has a capacity of 8 GB. Note that cards need to be formatted in FAT32 and that it is most handy to have all images stored in the root directory.

SD card technology works with 3.3V control logic while an Arduino UNO works with 5V control logic. The voltage requirements for a card reader integrated in a TFT shield is taken care of by the voltage regulator and level shifters of the shield, so don’t worry.

figure 2. left: the back of the 3.5’ TFT shield of figure 1 – all pins visible. Four pins (marked ‘SD_xx’) support the SD card reader while the remaining pins provide power and serve (marked LCD_xx) the parallel interface of the display. Displays with an ILI9341, ILI9481, or ILI 9486 controller are fully supported by the MCUFRIEND_kbv.h library.

Images: The only format recognized by Arduino is Microsoft’s BMP format. BMP is an uncompressed format that exists in several color depths: 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 bit. The 24-bit color depth (R8G8B8), designated in Windows as ‘True Color’ is the only format accepted by the Arduino. The file system on the SD cards works with eight-character filenames that reminisces good old DOS times long ago, when short file names were the norm. Names longer than 8 characters become shorthanded with the ~ sign.

Image dimensions:My photo frame image collection contains pictures with different dimensions and different positions (portrait, landscape). The screen dimensions of my favorite photo frame however, are fixed: 320*480 pixels. What happens to pictures whose dimensions exceed those of the screen? I have tested this by taking a picture of my favorite dog, called ‘Bastien’. The original picture dimensions (landscape) was scaled to 1600*1200 pixels and exported as 24-bit BMP: bastien1.bmp. Further downscaling was done to 800*600, 400*300 and 200*150 pixels. The resulting pictures were exported to SD card as BMPs: bastien2.bmp, bastien3.bmp and bastien4.bmp. Three of these pictures (bastien2, 3 and 4) were perfectly displayed on screen (figure 2). The 1600*1200 image was shown garbled. The sketch does not scale, it just transfers the image from the SD card to the display. The display acts as a kind of keyhole giving access to the entire picture. Keyholes work as long as pictures are no larger than the keyhole. With pictures larger than the keyhole the upper left part of the content is shown, e.g., that of bastien2.bmp (800*600; fig 3C) and the remaining is invisible beyond the edges of the display. This makes one wonder what the maximum pixel format is that is supported by the controller. In case of this display with an ILI9481 controller some experimenting learned that all images with conventional image formats up to 1280*1024 pixels are supported. It does not matter whether this format is in portrait or landscape. beyond these dimensions the pcitures become garbled on screen. On-card file size of the 1280*1024 pixel images is 3.9 MB which makes it attractive to believe that maximum allowed file size is 4 MB.

library: MCUFRIEND_kbv.h is an extremely flexible library that is meticulously kept up to date by David Prentice, its creator. Thanks to this library most Arduino display shields on the market are supported. David provides assistance via the Arduino forum – https://forum.arduino.cc.

figure 3. Image dimensions test. The same image scaled and then exported. Three dimension formats: 150*200, 300*400 and 600*800 pixels. The images in A and B are within the display dimensions of 320 pixels high and 480 pixels wide and are shown in all their glory on screen where pixel (0,0) is in the upper left corner of the display. The dimensions of the image in C (bastien2.bmp; 800*600 pixels) exceed the display dimensions; the left upper part of the image is shown while the remaining is off screen.

With a bare Arduino Nano it is very well possible to connect parallel displays. In several previous projects (*, **) this has been achieved. The only barrier is that a parallel TFT needs, apart from two power wires and GND, five control wires and 8 data wires to provide a working, stable interface. This wiring can be acchieved with Dupont jumper wires . However to get rid of what easily becomes a massive tangle of wires and to have permanently at hand a reliable, stable assembly I constructed some time ago a ‘Nano-parallel TFT display bench’ (*) that suits a range of parallel-interface TFT shields. On this bench I mounted the TFT display previously used with the UNO and connected the bench with an external SD card reader. The sketch used with the Arduino UNO worked perfectly with this assembly. Modification of the sketch was not necessary.

A table listing the pins of the Nano necessary for wiring the TFT display is shown, together with a wiring diagram, in figure 5. Card readers standard have four control pins: MISO, CLS, MOSI and CS. These need to be wired to pins 12, 13, 11 and 10 of the Nano. Note that card reader technology works with 3.3V control logic while a Nano has 5-volt control logic so verify that your SD card reader is 5V compliant. The card reader used here is 3.3V-5V compliant, as witnessed by the presence of pins for 3.3V and 5V power plus an on-board voltage regulator. Both voltages (as power supply to the card reader) were tested, and there were no differences in performance.

figure 5. Wiring diagram and pin wireout for an Arduino Nano connected to a standalone SD card reader. Notice that SD cards are 3.3V devices. The card reader usually has an on-board voltage regulator.

figure 6. Complete wiring diagram and pin wireout for an Arduino Nano connected to a standalone SD card reader and to a parallel-interface TFT display (e.g. UNO shield).

Figure 6 shows the complete wiring diagram for all components. I previously built a Nano-TFT bench (*). This bench was used in the present project. Figure 7 shows a working assembly consisting of the Nano-TFT bench connected to an external SD card reader.

figure 7. The same display as in figure 1 now on a bench powered by a Nano (left). The bench has the advantage that free pins have been wired to a row pin headers below the display. The image on display is the 1280*1024 version of the ‘bastien’ picture. The SD card reader receives here power from the Nano’s 3.3V pin.

Both options: UNO with TFT shield and Nano-TFT shield-separate card reader, work fine. Pictures are shown with vivid colors and great brightness on screen. With large pictures (320*480 or larger) the line-for-line transfer of the bitmap from card to display is evident, reminiscent of the old days with slow computers and low-capacity graphic cards. Just as in the old days the best performance of a slide show is obtained when all pictures in the show have the same dimensions, preferably pixel dimensions that match those of the display: 320*240 or 320*480. As 320*480 needs twice the number of pixels as 320*240, loading speed of the smaller images can be anticipated twice as fast as that of the bigger pictures.

The zip file ‘UNO_TFT_photoframe.zip contains the sketch (.ino) that runs a slide show on the UNO-TFT shield as well as on the Nano-TFT-shield-separate SD card reader. Note that this sketch is a slightly modified version of the example ‘showBMP_kbv_Uno’ provided with the MCUFRIEND_kbv.h library created by David Prentice. All credits to David. Of course you have to prepare yourself a SD card loaded with .BMP ‘True Color’ formatted color pictures with dimensions matching those of your display

With this article I kick off my series on the Arduino Esplora board. Today"s project is a nice (and cheap!) little digital picture frame that uses the Esplora"s TFT Screen add-on.

The second component that you need is the Arduino TFT screen. This is a small 160x128 pixel 16-bit color display that plugs into a socket on the Esplora board. This screen also includes a micro-SD card slot that will give the Arduino board the ability to read and write files to SD cards.

The original Arduino brand of this screen costs $25, but it has been out of stock for a while. There are many clones on Amazon and Ebay that sell for the same or lower price.

Note: when you buy the screen make sure it is the kind that plugs into the Arduino Esplora, as there are other very similar screens that have different connectors.

The hardware preparations are really simple. The TFT screen plugs into the front socket of the Arduino Esplora. After you connect it you can power the board by connecting it to your computer using the USB cable.

If you are using a Windows PC you need to install drivers for your Arduino board. The process is explained in the Arduino documentation. If you are using Windows 8 there is an additional complication because the Arduino drivers aren"t signed by Microsoft and this version of Windows does not accept drivers that are not signed. The process to bypass the signed driver requirement is described in detail in this page.

Now it is time to install the Arduino Software. This software contains the tools to write and upload programs to your Arduino board. Make sure you install version 1.0.5 or newer.

With the Arduino board connected, launch the Arduino software. In the Tools menu open the Board submenu and make sure you select the Arduino Esplora from the list.

The setup() function contains instructions that initialize the Arduino. In the above example the serial port is initialized to run at 9600 bauds, and pin 13 is initialized as an output pin.

The loop() function contains the body of the program. This function is called over and over. In the example the function prints the message "Hello, world!" to the serial port, then gives power to pin 13, which on most Arduino boards turns an on-board LED on. The delay() function waits for the number of milliseconds given as argument, in this case half a second. After the delay the LED is turned off by removing power from pin 13, and then another wait of half a second is done. The cycle then repeats.

The TFT screen is controlled with the help of the TFT and SPI libraries that come with the Arduino software. Libraries contain utility functions that are generic and can be used by many programs.

The EsploraTFT object represents the screen. In the setup() function its begin() method is invoked to initialize the display. Then in loop() the background() method is called to change the color. The three arguments to background() are the red, green, blue components of the color, each a value from 0 to 255. The black variable declared near the top is used to alternate the colors each time loop() executes.

For this project images will be displayed on the screen. To have the most flexibility I have decided to write my own image drawing function, so the individual pixels need to be set one by one to the correct color, using the drawPixel() method. As an introductory example to pixel drawing, the following Arduino program draws a horizontal red line in the middle of the screen:

If this seems like an arbitrary representation consider that the Arduino has a little-endian CPU, so the two bytes are reversed when stored in memory. And now the five red bits appear first, followed by the six green bits and then the five blue bits.

If you search for other picture slideshows for the Arduino you will find that most, if not all, read the images in BMP format from a memory card installed in the SD slot in the back of the LCD screen. This requires you to convert the images, which you probably have as high resolution JPGs to 160x128 BMPs.

For this project I"ve decided to take a completely different approach. Instead of using the SD card as storage I take advantage of the serial connection between the Arduino and the computer. The Esplora acts as a server, it waits for the computer to send pictures to display over the serial port.

The following Python script runs on the computer connected to the Arduino and accomplishes the task of loading an image, scaling it to 160x128 while preserving the aspect ratio and finally sending it one pixel at a time over the serial port:

Finally, the function converts each pixel to the 16-bit format used by the Arduino TFT screen and sends each as two bytes over the serial connection, given as third argument to the function.

The character I is sent before the image data, to inform the Esplora that an image is coming. It is always a good idea to leave room for expansion in any communication protocol, so by adding a one byte prefix new commands can be added later.

In loop() the program waits until the is serial data available, and then reads one byte. If it is the I byte then it gets into a for-loop that iterates over all the rows in the image. For each row it reads the entire line of 16-bit pixels into a buffer. Once the entire line is stored an inner loop that iterates on the columns draws the pixels using drawPixel().

Why read a line using a while loop? Because the serial port in the Arduino has a buffer of only 64 bytes, so a single read would never return more than that amount. An entire line has 160 pixels, which at 2 bytes per pixel make it a 320 byte buffer.

Copy/paste the above program into the Arduino software and upload it to your Esplora. Once the screen turns black the board is waiting for images sent from the computer.

Now you can run the Python script to send an image over, but first make sure you edit the bottom two lines to use the correct serial port number for your board and the path to a JPG image that you want to use:

If you connect the LCD screen to a different Arduino then you can run this program by removing the IS_ESPLORA definition at the top and setting the correct pin constants where the TFT object is initialized.

If you recall, images are prepended with an I character in the serial communication. This version of the Arduino program accepts a second command, prefixed with the letter C for "connect". When the client sends this command the Arduino responds by writing the width and height of the screen to the serial port. This is useful to make the client software independent of the hardware. If one day you install a larger screen then the client will not need to change, since the picture dimensions are discovered from the communication with the device.

The Python script, called client.py is given a folder in the command line arguments. During start up the script searches the folder and all its sub-folders for jpeg pictures. Random images found in this folder are uploaded periodically to the Arduino board, making it into a slideshow.

Note that the Uno is a bit slower than the Esplora, so I had to lower the baud rate to give it enough time to process the pixels. Another inconvenience is that many of the Arduinos (including the Uno) do a reset each time a serial connection is started or ended, and for this reason the first image is displayed after a delay that gives the board time to start up.

The screen is 1.77" diagonal, with 160 x 128 pixel resolution. The TFT library interfaces with the screen"s controller through SPI when using the TFT library. Refer to the screen"s data sheet for complete details.

The Arduino TFT library extends the Adafruit GFX, and Adafruit ST7735 libraries that it is based on. The GFX library is responsible for the drawing routines, while the ST7735 library is specific to the screen on the Arduino screen. The Arduino specific additions were designed to work as similarly to the Processing API as possible.

The TFT library relies on the SPI library, which must be included in any sketch that uses the scree. If you wish to use the SD card, you need to include the SD library as well.

And this is coming from someone with an Electronics & Programming background. I am shocked at the dearth of documentation and multiple libraries with multiple dates for this thing. And to find out that it might start out with a Mirror Image - WOW!

I am trying to make a truly Universal Remote Control out of this mess. I just got the Arduino Uno & the Display and put it together and there are NO pins left to operate an IR LED.

Can this 2.8" elegoo display play video at all? I"m trying to make a unit that an older woman, in her 80"s can play a video on it, if I set it up correctly? This is for a really good cause, I desperately need help, this is super important. Helping elderly folks with modern technology is tough. But I really need it to be able to play a video off the SD card if possible. Any help would be super highly appreciated.ReplyUpvote

Hello,please post our code also ..the screen driver must be known and that info must be known in order to get these things to work correctly..you show your code and then the vid blurs..Someone needs to write a pdf teaching how ,what ,when and why concerning these screens I would gladly pay $10.00 and I am sure others would too.I have 3 different tftlcds only 1 works its for the mega and Bomer has a lib for it,I am really considering use of Nextion units from now on 4 pins easy programming but higher cost...also the small cell phone screens use spi mode and are real easy to set up and use

The program runs and nothing is displayed but a white screen. when I open the COM4 I see that when I hit the screen numbers appear to calibrate the screens position so it is registering but not showing up on the LCD. please help me before I pull all my hair out.1

I"m thinking I need an Arduino Mega to do what I want - a Universal Remote. Because after mounting the display there are NO pins left for anything else.0

I"m having issues getting this display to work on my Arduino 101 board with the libraries that are suggested - errors in compiling seem to indicate that the board type isn"t supported in the Adafruit_TFTLCD library. Here"s a representative error:

I finally got the touchscreen to work correct using your links to the libraries. Found out that this specific TFT display module uses pin 6 & 7 for touch sensor, instead of the standard 4 & 5.0

I never received a response on this, so went through the painful process of copying code from the video. It can be found here for others that might need it. Not that this has some minor changes, but is fully functional and I will continue to refine: https://github.com/siliconghost/Arduino_2.8in_TFT_wSD

Then you can see some display tests appear on the LCD screen, such as displaying different colors, drawing vertical and horizontal lines, drawing circles, …etc.