arduino tft display image brands
5V (LCD)5V Arduino MISO (LCD)Pin 12 Arduino SCK (LCD)Pin 13 Arduino MOSI (LCD)Pin 11 Arduino LCD CS (LCD)Pin 10 Arduino SD CS (LCD)Pin 4 Arduino D/C (LCD)Pin 9 Arduino RESET (LCD)Pin 8 Arduino BL (LCD)5V Arduino GND (LCD)GND Arduino
Keep the following in mind:The image must be a .bmp fileDon"t make the image larger as 160 x 128 pixelsMake sure the image has arduino.bmp as filename and must be placed in the root domain of your SD card!The Arduino & TFT screen has to be voltage-free when assembling the SD card.
In this article, you will learn how to use TFT LCDs by Arduino boards. From basic commands to professional designs and technics are all explained here.
In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.
There are several components to achieve this. LEDs, 7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.
TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.
In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.
In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.
In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.
There are several components to achieve this. LEDs, 7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.
TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.
In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.
In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.
Size of displays affects your project parameters. Bigger Display is not always better. if you want to display high-resolution images and signs, you should choose a big size display with higher resolution. But it decreases the speed of your processing, needs more space and also needs more current to run.
After choosing the right display, It’s time to choose the right controller. If you want to display characters, tests, numbers and static images and the speed of display is not important, the Atmega328 Arduino boards (such as Arduino UNO) are a proper choice. If the size of your code is big, The UNO board may not be enough. You can use Arduino Mega2560 instead. And if you want to show high resolution images and motions with high speed, you should use the ARM core Arduino boards such as Arduino DUE.
In electronics/computer hardware a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a microprocessor, microcontroller, ASIC or general-purpose peripheral interface and a particular type of display device, e.g. LCD, LED, OLED, ePaper, CRT, Vacuum fluorescent or Nixie.
The display driver will typically accept commands and data using an industry-standard general-purpose serial or parallel interface, such as TTL, CMOS, RS232, SPI, I2C, etc. and generate signals with suitable voltage, current, timing and demultiplexing to make the display show the desired text or image.
The LCDs manufacturers use different drivers in their products. Some of them are more popular and some of them are very unknown. To run your display easily, you should use Arduino LCDs libraries and add them to your code. Otherwise running the display may be very difficult. There are many free libraries you can find on the internet but the important point about the libraries is their compatibility with the LCD’s driver. The driver of your LCD must be known by your library. In this article, we use the Adafruit GFX library and MCUFRIEND KBV library and example codes. You can download them from the following links.
You must add the library and then upload the code. If it is the first time you run an Arduino board, don’t worry. Just follow these steps:Go to www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software of your OS. Install the IDE software as instructed.
By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println(); . First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().
First you should convert your image to hex code. Download the software from the following link. if you don’t want to change the settings of the software, you must invert the color of the image and make the image horizontally mirrored and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now add it to the software and convert it. Open the exported file and copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are sizes of image. you can change the color of the image in the last input.
Upload your image and download the converted file that the UTFT libraries can process. Now copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are size of the image.
In this template, We converted a .jpg image to .c file and added to the code, wrote a string and used the fade code to display. Then we used scroll code to move the screen left. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.
In this template, We used sin(); and cos(); functions to draw Arcs with our desired thickness and displayed number by text printing function. Then we converted an image to hex code and added them to the code and displayed the image by bitmap function. Then we used draw lines function to change the style of the image. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.
In this template, We created a function which accepts numbers as input and displays them as a pie chart. We just use draw arc and filled circle functions.
In this template, We added a converted image to code and then used two black and white arcs to create the pointer of volumes. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.
In this template, We added a converted image and use the arc and print function to create this gauge. Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.
while (a < b) { Serial.println(a); j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 255, 255)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)
while (b < a) { j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 0, 0)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)
In this template, We display simple images one after each other very fast by bitmap function. So you can make your animation by this trick. Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.
In this template, We just display some images by RGBbitmap and bitmap functions. Just make a code for touchscreen and use this template. Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.
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 E43RG34827LW2M300-R is a color active matrix TFT (Thin Film Transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display) that uses amorphous silicon TFT as a switching device. This model is composed of a transmissive type TFT LCD panel, driver circuit, and backlight. The resolution of a 4.3” TFT LCD contains 480x272 pixels and can display up to 16.7M colors.
The RA8875 Driver board is capable of driving 4”, 5” and 7” 40-pin TFTs with up to 800x480 pixels. It can be used with the Arduino and features 60Hz refresh rate, 4 MHz pixel clocking and a resistive touchscreen. It contains 768KB of RAM for buffering the display. The interface uses SPI and has a selection of hardware-accelerated shapes like ellipses, triangles, and rectangles. Moreover, it has a built-in English/European font set.
Caution:Not all 40-pin TFTs may work with this board and may even damage it or the TFT itself because of different pinouts and backlight management. 24V from the boost supply may be inadvertently applied to the logic pins. So please check the TFT datasheet first.
4.b Wire up the circuit as shown in the following schematic (Figure 3). The Datalogger or Ethernet Shield is plugged on top of the Arduino UNO. The actual setup is shown in Figure 4.
4.d Save that image on the SD card. The filename should be equal or less than 8 characters. In this example, the name: “flcdlog0.bmp” was used (see line 69 of the sketch). You can use another image or filename.
4.g Specify Arduino UNO is used and select the correct PC COM port. In the IDE top menu, select Tools > “Board: Arduino / Genuino UNO”. Then again, Tools > Port. Usually, it is COM3.
The E43RG34827LW2M300-R TFT has a wide-array of applications apart from this simple example of drawing bitmaps. It has been demonstrated that it can work with an Arduino via the RA8875 board. More complicated designs can be derived from this application note.
I found the answer to this problem. After reading multiple web pages / YouTube videos from multiple authors on this device and ~all of them warning you must never connect the Vcc to 5v or it will destroy the display, I found one or two that suggested you could use 5v because in this particular module there is a built-in regulator. So, faced with the thing being useless anyway, I decided to take the plunge and connect the Vcc of the TFT to the 5v pin of the Arduino and - hey presto - it works perfectly (see picture below: note the clear full image without the reset button being held down and also notice the voltage pin of the TFT is now connected to Arduino 5v compared to the pictures in my question).
The picture below shows the back of my TFT display module and, from what I have read, it is the J3Y transistor that is key to the voltage regulation in this module.
I hypothesise that pressing the reset button must have allowed equalisation of the voltages somehow but it is beyond my knowledge to explain it. I tried measuring the 3.3v pin on the Arduino with a voltmeter while holding down the reset button but I could see no change (the TFT module was not in situ for this test so maybe there is some interaction between Arduino and the TFT circuitry during reset).
Please note: I suspect this is a peculiarity of the particular TFT display module I have. Please DON"T run your 3.3v devices at 5v unless you have good reason to believe that they can take it. I only tried this after reading a couple of pages (including the detailed specs on the TFT module seller"s listing) that suggested it would be OK with my particular TFT module - your"s may be different. But if you have the same problem you see in my question then maybe that is something to consider.
Note: The following picture is the connection diagram of the 2.8-inch TFT screen and Arduino uno, but this product is connected in exactly the same way.
If the Arduino board has an ICSP interface, set the SPI Config switch on the display module to the ICSP direction (by default) (the company"s Arduino UNO motherboard has an ICSP interface, just plug it in directly.).
This product uses the same LCD control chip and touch panel control chip as the 3.5-inch TFT screen of the same series of our company, so the code is completely compatible. The following takes 3.5-inch TFT as an example to introduce.
LCD_Show can display colorful patterns with different shapes and times. LCD_ShowBMP is for displaying the picture in BMP, and LCD_Touch is for using the touching function.
The display controller used in this product is ILI9486, and we need to initialize the controller through the SPI communication protocol, and the initialization functions are written in LCD_Driver.cpp.
The function functions related to the screen display are written in LCD_GUI.cpp. The function of each function and the parameters passed are explained in the source code. You can call it directly when you need to use it.
Before using LCD_ShowBMP to display pictures, first copy the pictures in the PIC folder in the data to the root directory of the SD card (you should understand that in the root directory, that is to save the pictures directly to the SD card, do not put them in any subfolders folder.).
Here is an explanation. This demo shows that the BMP picture first reads the picture data in the BMP format in the SD card through the SPI protocol, and then displays the data as an image.
These functions are all written in LCD_Bmp.cpp. In fact, the image data in BMP format with a specific file name is read from the SD card, and then the display function written by us is called to re-express the data as an image.
In fact, you can also use Image2Lcd image modulo software to convert images of different sizes and formats into array data, and then use the functions we wrote to display them.
Note: The following picture is the connection diagram of the 2.8-inch TFT screen and XNUCLEO-F103RB, but this product is connected in exactly the same way.
This product uses the same LCD control chip and touch panel control chip as the 3.5-inch TFT screen of the same series of our company, so the code is completely compatible. The following takes 3.5-inch TFT as an example to introduce.
After running the demo, it displays some characters and patterns at first, then displays four pictures, and finally displays the touch sketchpad function. Actually, three projects in the Arduino platform code are integrated in the main function, we place the three main functions in sequence and place TP_DrawBoard(); in an infinite loop to achieve the above functions.
Before using LCD_ShowBMP to display pictures, copy the pictures in the PIC folder in the data to the root directory of the SD card, and then insert the SD card into the SD card slot on the back of the screen to start the download program verification.
In fact, you can also use Image2Lcd image modulo software to convert images of different sizes and formats into array data, and then use the functions we wrote to display them.
Hi guys, welcome to today’s tutorial. Today, we will look on how to use the 1.8″ ST7735 colored TFT display with Arduino. The past few tutorials have been focused on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display extensively but there will be a time when we will need to use a colored display or something bigger with additional features, that’s where the 1.8″ ST7735 TFT display comes in.
The ST7735 TFT display is a 1.8″ display with a resolution of 128×160 pixels and can display a wide range of colors ( full 18-bit color, 262,144 shades!). The display uses the SPI protocol for communication and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer which means it can be used with all kinds of microcontroller and you only need 4 i/o pins. To complement the display, it also comes with an SD card slot on which colored bitmaps can be loaded and easily displayed on the screen.
The schematics for this project is fairly easy as the only thing we will be connecting to the Arduino is the display. Connect the display to the Arduino as shown in the schematics below.
Due to variation in display pin out from different manufacturers and for clarity, the pin connection between the Arduino and the TFT display is mapped out below:
We will use two example sketches to demonstrate the use of the ST7735 TFT display. The first example is the lightweight TFT Display text example sketch from the Adafruit TFT examples. It can be accessed by going to examples -> TFT -> Arduino -> TFTDisplaytext. This example displays the analog value of pin A0 on the display. It is one of the easiest examples that can be used to demonstrate the ability of this display.
The second example is the graphics test example from the more capable and heavier Adafruit ST7735 Arduino library. I will explain this particular example as it features the use of the display for diverse purposes including the display of text and “animated” graphics. With the Adafruit ST7735 library installed, this example can be accessed by going to examples -> Adafruit ST7735 library -> graphics test.
The first thing, as usual, is to include the libraries to be used after which we declare the pins on the Arduino to which our LCD pins are connected to. We also make a slight change to the code setting reset pin as pin 8 and DC pin as pin 9 to match our schematics.
Next, we create an object of the library with the pins to which the LCD is connected on the Arduino as parameters. There are two options for this, feel free to choose the most preferred.
Next, we move to the void setup function where we initialize the screen and call different test functions to display certain texts or images. These functions can be edited to display what you want based on your project needs.
The complete code for this is available under the libraries example on the Arduino IDE. Don’t forget to change the DC and the RESET pin configuration in the code to match the schematics.
Uploading the code to the Arduino board brings a flash of different shapes and text with different colors on the display. I captured one and its shown in the image below.
That’s it for this tutorial guys, what interesting thing are you going to build with this display? Let’s get the conversation started. Feel free to reach me via the comment section if you have any questions as regards this project.
However changing the size of the table from const unsigned char font16_B[96][16] to const unsigned char font16_B[96][8] means that the characters displayed on the TFT screen will be smaller.
So there is a tradeoff between the amount of memory used and the character display size. Larger displayed characters requires more memory for the description of the glyphs.
Using Preprocessor directives to select the font table to use and selecting a subsection of the file font8x8_basic.h from Hepper"s GitHub repository, I added the following to the KeDei TFT library.
I have forked the KeDei TFT library source code from Osoyoo"s GitHub and have begun modifications to the source. The fork is located at https://github.com/RichardChambers/driver/tree/master/KeDeiTFT
One of the changes made was to allow text to be double high and/or double wide. This image is of the current version of a scanner/scale simulator showing the difference in style between text that is double high and double wide as well as text that is double high.
This updated image show what is expected to be the final GUI for now. It allows for changing the weight and it also allows for setting various status bits to indicate scale error conditions such as under capacity.
In order to support the number of buttons, I rewrote the Button class so that I could have buttons which share some data thus saving about 11 bytes per button. So this GUI with eight buttons that are using the data sharing feature saves some 77 bytes of memory, a significant saving for an Arduino.
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.
The new line of 3.5” TFT displays with IPS technology is now available! Three touchscreen options are available: capacitive, resistive, or without a touchscreen.
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