arduino tft display image in stock

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

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:

While these are the displays we have, and on which this tutorial was tested, we are confident it will work perfectly fine with most of the other Arduino compatible displays.

For each of the displays mentioned above, we have covered in past how to program and connect them to Arduino. You should check those tutorials, as they will give you the necessary background knowledge on how each of these displays works.

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.

As usual, each of the components listed above can be bought from the links attached to them. While having all of the displays listed above may be useful, you can use just one of them for this tutorial.

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.

Not all Arduino displays are available as shields, so when working with any of them, connect the display as you would when displaying text (we recommend following the detailed tutorial for the display type you use of the above list). This means no special connection is required to display graphics.

Before an image is displayed on any of the Arduino screens, it needs to be converted to a C compatible hex file and that can only happen when the image is in bitmap form. Thus, our first task is to create a bitmap version of the graphics to be displayed or convert the existing image to a bitmap file. There are several tools that can be used for creation/conversion of bitmap images including, Corel Draw and Paint.net, but for this tutorial, we will use the Paint.net.

The resolution of the graphics created should be smaller than the resolution of your display to ensure the graphics fit properly on the display. For this example, the resolution of the display is 320 x 340, thus the resolution of the graphics was set to195 x 146 pixels.

Your graphics could also include some text. Just ensure the background is black and the fill color is white if you plan to change the color within your Arduino code.

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.

Paste the bit array in the graphics.c file and save. Since we have two graphics (the car and the text), You can paste their data array in the same file. check the graphics.c file attached to the zip file, under the download section to understand how to do this. Don’t forget to declare the data type as “const unsigned char“, add PROGEM in front of it and include the avr/pgmspace.h header file as shown in the image below.  This instructs the code to store the graphics data in the program memory of the Arduino.

With this done, we are now ready to write the code. Do note that this procedure is the same for all kind of displays and all kind of graphics. Convert the graphics to a bitmap file and use the Img2code utility to convert it into a hex file which can then be used in your Arduino code.

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.

The GFX library, among several other useful functions, has a function called drawBitmap(), which enables the display of a monochrome bitmap image on the display. This function allows the upload of monochrome only (single color) graphics, but this can be overcome by changing the color of the bitmap using some code.

The Adafruit libraries do not support all of the displays but there are several modifications of the libraries on the internet for more displays. If you are unable to find a modified version of the library suitable for your the display, all you need do is copy the code of the drawBitmap() function from the GFX library and paste it in the Arduino sketch for your project such that it becomes a user-defined function.

The first two are thex and y coordinates of a point on the screen where we want the image to be displayed. The next argument is the array in which the bitmap is loaded in our code, in this case, it will be the name of the car and the text array located in the graphics.c file. The next two arguments are the width and height of the bitmap in pixels, in other words, the resolution of the image. The last argument is the color of the bitmap, we can use any color we like. The bitmap data must be located in program memory since Arduino has a limited amount of RAM memory available.

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.

Next, we specify the name of the graphics to be displayed; car and title. At this stage, you should have added the bit array for these two bitmaps in the graphics.c file and the file should be placed in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

With that done, we proceed to the void loop function, under the loop function, we call the drawbitmap() function to display the car and the text bitmap using different colors.

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.

Plug in your screen as shown above. If you are using any other display, connect it as shown in the corresponding linked tutorial. With the schematics in place, connect the Arduino board to your PC and upload the code. Don’t forget the graphics file needs to be in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

That’s it for this tutorial guys. The procedure is the same for all kinds of Arduino compatible displays. If you get stuck while trying to replicate this using any other display, feel free to reach out to me via the comment sections below.

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.

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.

In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work  you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:

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.

This post shows how to draw bitmap images on the ST7735 TFT using Arduino UNO board where the Arduino loads the BMP images from SD card and print them on the display.

In the display module there is AMS1117-3V3 voltage regulator which supplies the display controller with 3.3V (because it works with 3.3V only). The regulator steps down the 5V that comes from the Arduino board into 3.3V.

All Arduino UNO output pins are 5V, connecting a 5V pin directly to the ST7735 display board may damage its controller circuit. To avoid that, I connected each control line of the display to the Arduino board through 1k ohm resistor.

In this project I used microSD card module, this module is supplied from circuit 5V source that comes from the Arduino UNO board. This module contains AMS1117-3V3 voltage regulator which is used to supply the micro SD card with 3.3V. Also this module contains an IC which is 74LVC125A and it’s used as level translator (from 5V to 3.3V).

The digital pins 10, 11, 12 and 13 are hardware SPI module pins of ATmega328P microcontroller (Arduino UNO microcontroller). The SD card and the ST7735 TFT share the same SPI bus.

As an addition to Arduino SPI library and SD library which are both built-in libraries (comes with Arduino IDE), the following code requires two libraries from Adafruit Industries:

The first library is a driver for the ST7735 TFT display which can be installed from Arduino IDE library manager (Sketch —> Include Library —> Manage Libraries …, in the search box write “st7735” and install the one from Adafruit).

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.

This TFT display is big (3.5" diagonal) bright and colorful! 480x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display.

This display has a controller built into it with RAM buffering so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. The display can be used in two modes: 8-bit or SPI. For 8-bit mode, you"ll need 8 digital data lines and 4 or 5 digital control lines to read and write to the display (12 lines total). SPI mode requires only 5 pins total (SPI data in, data out, clock, select, and d/c) but is slower than 8-bit mode.

This Arduino album project is simple as it uses mainly an Arduino Uno board and an Arduino touch LCD shield only. The photographs to be displayed are converted to 240×320-pixel size with 24-bit colour format in BMP (bitmap) files using Microsoft Paint (or similar) software and stored on a micro SD card that is normally used for cell phones.

The Arduino Uno is a widely used microcontroller board based on Atmega328P microprocessor that is used in Arduino family boards. It has 14 digital input/output pins of which six can be used as PWM outputs and six as analogue inputs, and a USB port with 16MHz quartz crystal.

The Arduino touch LCD shield works on ILI9341 chip and has a built-in microSD card. The shield’s LCD display is sufficiently big (6cm, diagonally), bright (with four white-LED backlight), and colourful (18-bit having 262144 different shades). It has good resolution of 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control, 8-bit digital interface, plus four control lines with reset pin. The SD card has four more control pins. All the pin connections are directly compatible with Arduino Uno board, which eliminates wiring and new PCB requirement. It uses 3.3V power supply and supports both 3.3V or 5V logic levels.

Here MAX_FILES is the maximum number of files to be stored in the SD card and to be displayed sequentially, and DISP_DELAY is the delay (or time gap) in milliseconds for displaying each photograph.

Now disconnect the SD card reader from the computer and take out the microSD from card reader. Insert the microSD into the microSD card slot in Arduino LCD shield, as shown in Fig. 2.

Properly position the Arduino LCD shield on the Arduino Uno board, matching the 5V, 3.3V, and GND pins. Connect a 9V DC power supply to the Arduino Uno board.

Once the root folder is read from the SD card, the list of files stored in the SD card will be displayed on the LCD screen. Thereafter the photographs will be displayed sequentially.

(Note. The original BMP file supports colours up to 24-bit resolution, whereas LCD shield supports colours up to 18-bit resolution. So, display output may have slight mismatch with colours of original BMP file.)

I just recently resolved my problem on getting images to load on to my TFT display via the SD card. Thanks to UTFT_SdRaw!!! it"s by far the easiest to use. For a novice like me, its been a real feat. Now translating the code, I am trying to turn on and off the image when the pin state changes:

So now when the pin state changes back to low (0vdc), how do I remove the image without clearing the entire screen? The image seems to stay frozen instead of disappearing when the pin voltage falls away.