arduino 3.5 inch tft lcd paint sketch in stock

Displays are one of the best ways to provide feedback to users of a particular device or project and often the bigger the display, the better. For today’s tutorial, we will look on how to use the relatively big, low cost, ILI9481 based, 3.5″ Color TFT display with Arduino.

This 3.5″ color TFT display as mentioned above, is based on the ILI9481 TFT display driver. The module offers a resolution of 480×320 pixels and comes with an SD card slot through which an SD card loaded with graphics and UI can be attached to the display. The module is also pre-soldered with pins for easy mount (like a shield) on either of the Arduino Mega and Uno, which is nice since there are not many big TFT displays that work with the Arduino Uno.

The module is compatible with either of the Arduino Uno or the Arduino Mega, so feel free to choose between them or test with both. As usual, these components can be bought via the links attached to them.

One of the good things about this module is the ease with which it can be connected to either of the Arduino Mega or Uno. For this tutorial, we will use the Arduino Uno, since the module comes as a shield with pins soldered to match the Uno’s pinout. All we need to do is snap it onto the top of the Arduino Uno as shown in the image below, thus no wiring required.

This ease of using the module mentioned above is, however, one of the few downsides of the display. If we do not use the attached SD card slot, we will be left with 6 digital and one analog pin as the module use the majority of the Arduino pins. When we use the SD card part of the display, we will be left with just 2 digital and one analog pin which at times limits the kind of project in which we can use this display. This is one of the reasons while the compatibility of this display with the Arduino Mega is such a good news, as the “Mega” offers more digital and analog pins to work with, so when you need extra pins, and size is not an issue, use the Mega.

To easily write code to use this display, we will use the GFX and TFT LCD libraries from “Adafruit” which can be downloaded here. With the library installed we can easily navigate through the examples that come with it and upload them to our setup to see the display in action. By studying these examples, one could easily learn how to use this display. However, I have compiled some of the most important functions for the display of text and graphics into an Arduino sketch for the sake of this tutorial. The complete sketch is attached in a zip file under the download section of this tutorial.

As usual, we will do a quick run through of the code and we start by including the libraries which we will use for the project, in this case, the Adafruit GFX and TFT LCD libraries.

With this done, the Void Setup() function is next. We start the function by issuing atft.reset() command to reset the LCD to default configurations. Next, we specify the type of the LCD we are using via the LCD.begin function and set the rotation of the TFT as desired. We proceed to fill the screen with different colors and display different kind of text using diverse color (via the tft.SetTextColor() function) and font size (via the tft.setTextSize() function).

This article explains how can we leverage Full color 3.5” 480 *320 TFT LCD with Arduino UNO, which is one of the component to display the information with required size, font, color and to use the same as touch screen for input.

TFT LCDs are the most popular color displays – the displays in smartphones, tablets, and laptops are actually the TFT LCDs only. There are TFT LCD shields available for Arduino in a variety of sizes like 1.44″, 1.8″, 2.0″, 2.4″, and 2.8″. Arduino is quite a humble machine whenever it comes to process or control graphics. After all, it is a microcontroller platform, and graphical applications usually require much greater processing resources. Still, Arduino is capable enough to control small display units. TFT LCDs are colorful display screens that can host beautiful user interfaces.

Most of the smaller TFT LCD shields can be controlled using the Adafruit TFT LCD library. There is also a larger TFT LCD shield of 3.5 inches, with an ILI9486 8-bit driver.

The Adafruit library does not support the ILI9486 driver. Actually, the Adafruit library is written to control only TFT displays smaller than 3.5 inches. To control the 3.5 inch TFT LCD touch screen, we need another library. This is MCUFRIEND_kbv. The MCUFRIEND_kbv library is, in fact, even easier to use in comparison to the Adafruit TFT LCD library. This library only requires instantiating a TFT object and even does not require specifying pin connections.

TFT LCDs for ArduinoUser interfaces are an essential part of any embedded application. The user interface enables any interaction with the end-user and makes possible the ultimate use of the device. The user interfaces are hosted using a number of devices like seven-segments, character LCDs, graphical LCDs, and full-color TFT LCDs. Out of all these devices, only full-color TFT displays are capable of hosting sophisticated interfaces. A sophisticated user interface may have many data fields to display or may need to host menus and sub-menus or host interactive graphics. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD capable of hosting high-quality images.

Arduino operates at low frequency. That is why it is not possible to render high-definition images or videos with Arduino. However, Arduino can control a small TFT display screen rendering graphically enriched data and commands. By interfacing a TFT LCD touch screen with Arduino, it is possible to render interactive graphics, menus, charts, graphs, and user panels.

Some of the popular full-color TFT LCDs available for Arduino include 3.5″ 480×320 display, 2.8″ 400×200 display, 2.4″ 320×240 display and 1.8″ 220×176 display. A TFT screen of appropriate size and resolution can be selected as per a given application.

If the user interface has only graphical data and commands, Atmega328 Arduino boards can control the display. If the user interface is a large program hosting several menus and/or submenus, Arduino Mega2560 should be preferred to control the TFT display. If the user interface needs to host high-resolution images and motions, ARM core Arduino boards like the DUE should be used to control the TFT display.

MCUFRIEND_kbv libraryAdafruit TFT LCD library supports only small TFT displays. For large TFT display shields like 3.5-inch, 3.6-inch, 3.95-inch, including 2.4-inch and 2.8-inch TFT LCDs, MCUFRIEND_kbv library is useful. This library has been designed to control 28-pin TFT LCD shields for Arduino UNO. It also works with Arduino Mega2560. Apart from UNO and Mega2560, the library also supports LEONARDO, DUE, ZERO, and M0-PRO. It also runs on NUCLEO-F103 and TEENSY3.2 with Sparkfun Adapter. The Mcufriend-style shields tend to have a resistive TouchScreen on A1, 7, A2, 6 but are not always in the same direction rotation. The MCUFRIEND_kbv library can be included in an Arduino sketch from the library manager.

The 3.5-inch TFT LCD shield needs to be plugged atop the Arduino board. The Mcufriend-style shields are designed to fit into all the above-mentioned Arduino boards. The shields have a TFT touch screen that can display colorful images and interfaces and a micro SD card reader to save images and other data. A 3.5-inch TFT LCD touch screen has the following pin diagram.

This module is a 3.5-inch TFT LCD module with “320X480” resolution and 65K color display. It is suitable for Arduino Uno and Mega2560 development boards, and also supports SD card expansion function. It uses 8-bit parallel port communication, and the driver IC is ILI9486.

The 3.5-inch display is a ready-made shield for Arduino Uno, which can also be placed on the Arduino Mega. The pins of this shield are designed to be easily installed on the Arduino. The bad point about these modules is that they use all Arduino Uno pins.

my_lcd.Fill_Triangle(x_spec+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(i+1)*h_len-1,x_spec+side_len/2+i*side_len-1,y_spec+i*h_len-1,x_spec+(i+1)*side_len-1,y_spec+(i+1)*h_len-1);

my_lcd.Fill_Triangle(x_spec+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(5-i)*h_len-1,x_spec+side_len/2+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(4-i)*h_len-1,x_spec+(i+1)*side_len-1,y_spec+(5-i)*h_len-1);

my_lcd.Draw_Line(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Draw_Rectangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Draw_Round_Rectangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),5);

my_lcd.Draw_Triangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Fill_Round_Rectangle(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()/2-1-120+1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()/2-1-60+1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()/2-1+120-1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()/2-1+60-1,5);

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.

For this tutorial I composed three examples. The first example is distance measurement using ultrasonic sensor. The output from the sensor, or the distance is printed on the screen and using the touch screen we can select the units, either centimeters or inches.

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.

Here’s that function which uses the ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance and print the values with SevenSegNum font in green color, either in centimeters or inches. If you need more details how the ultrasonic sensor works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. Back in the loop section we can see what happens when we press the select unit buttons as well as the back button.

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:

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.).

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.

The demos are developed based on the HAL library. Download the program, find the STM32 program file directory, and open STM32\XNUCLEO-F103RB\lcd4in-demo\MDK-ARM\ lcd4in-demo.uvprojx.

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.

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (3.5" diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 320x480 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional resistive touch panel with controller XPT2046 attached by default and a optional capacitive touch panel with controller FT6236 attached by default, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen and doesn"t require pressing down on the screen with a stylus and has nice glossy glass cover.

The pin32 (SDO) of 3.5 display module is also used by touch panel or SD card SPI interface, so we must cut off this pin to avoid conflict with the touch panel or SD card.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (Due/Mega 2560).

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. We also have a touch screen library that detects x,y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

This is a 3.5” IPS capacitive Touchscreen Display. The module, with a resolution of 480x320, adopts ILI9488 as driver IC and SPI (4-line) communication mode. The board integrates touch chip GT911, employing I2C communication to realize multiple touchpoints controlling. The module also integrates an SD card slot allowing you to easily read the full-color bitmap. There are two modes of wiring supplied, normal pin header wiring and GDI. The latter one requires to work with a main controller board with a GDI interface (e.g. FireBeetle-M0). You can use it with only one FPC line plugging in, which reduces the complexity of the wiring. Furthermore, it features high resolution, wide viewing angle, and simple wiring, which can be used in all sorts of display applications, such as, IoT controlling device, game console, desktop event notifier, touch interface, etc.

An excellent new compatible library is available which can render TrueType fonts on a TFT screen (or into a sprite). This has been developed by takkaO and is available here. I have been reluctant to support yet another font format but this is an amazing library which is very easy to use. It provides access to compact font files, with fully scaleable anti-aliased glyphs. Left, middle and right justified text can also be printed to the screen. I have added TFT_eSPI specific examples to the OpenFontRender library and tested on RP2040 and ESP32 processors, however the ESP8266 does not have sufficient RAM. Here is a demo screen where a single 12kbyte font file binary was used to render fully anti-aliased glyphs of gradually increasing size on a 320x480 TFT screen:

For ESP32 ONLY, the TFT configuration (user setup) can now be included inside an Arduino IDE sketch providing the instructions in the example Generic->Sketch_with_tft_setup are followed. See ReadMe tab in that sketch for the instructions. If the setup is not in the sketch then the library settings will be used. This means that "per project" configurations are possible without modifying the library setup files. Please note that ALL the other examples in the library will use the library settings unless they are adapted and the "tft_setup.h" header file included. Note: there are issues with this approach, #2007 proposes an alternative method.

Smooth fonts can now be rendered direct to the TFT with very little flicker for quickly changing values. This is achieved by a line-by-line and block-by-block update of the glyph area without drawing pixels twice. This is a "breaking" change for some sketches because a new true/false parameter is needed to render the background. The default is false if the parameter is missing, Examples:

Frank Boesing has created an extension library for TFT_eSPI that allows a large range of ready-built fonts to be used. Frank"s library (adapted to permit rendering in sprites as well as TFT) can be downloaded here. More than 3300 additional Fonts are available here. The TFT_eSPI_ext library contains examples that demonstrate the use of the fonts.

Users of PowerPoint experienced with running macros may be interested in the pptm sketch generator here, this converts graphics and tables drawn in PowerPoint slides into an Arduino sketch that renders the graphics on a 480x320 TFT. This is based on VB macros created by Kris Kasprzak here.

DMA can now be used with the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) when used with both 8 bit parallel and 16 bit colour SPI displays. See "Bouncy_Circles" sketch.

The library now supports the Raspberry Pi Pico with both the official Arduino board package and the one provided by Earle Philhower. The setup file "Setup60_RP2040_ILI9341.h" has been used for tests with an ILI9341 display. At the moment only SPI interface displays have been tested. SPI port 0 is the default but SPI port 1 can be specifed in the setup file if those SPI pins are used.

The library now provides a "viewport" capability. See "Viewport_Demo" and "Viewport_graphicstest" examples. When a viewport is defined graphics will only appear within that window. The coordinate datum by default moves to the top left corner of the viewport, but can optionally remain at top left corner of TFT. The GUIslice library will make use of this feature to speed up the rendering of GUI objects (see #769).

An Arduino IDE compatible graphics and fonts library for 32 bit processors. The library is targeted at 32 bit processors, it has been performance optimised for STM32, ESP8266 and ESP32 types. The library can be loaded using the Arduino IDE"s Library Manager. Direct Memory Access (DMA) can be used with the ESP32, RP2040 and STM32 processors with SPI interface displays to improve rendering performance. DMA with a parallel interface is only supported with the RP2040.

For other processors the generic only SPI interface displays are supported and slower non-optimised standard Arduino SPI functions are used by the library.

"Four wire" SPI and 8 bit parallel interfaces are supported. Due to lack of GPIO pins the 8 bit parallel interface is NOT supported on the ESP8266. 8 bit parallel interface TFTs (e.g. UNO format mcufriend shields) can used with the STM32 Nucleo 64/144 range or the UNO format ESP32 (see below for ESP32).

The library supports some TFT displays designed for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) that are based on a ILI9486 or ST7796 driver chip with a 480 x 320 pixel screen. The ILI9486 RPi display must be of the Waveshare design and use a 16 bit serial interface based on the 74HC04, 74HC4040 and 2 x 74HC4094 logic chips. Note that due to design variations between these displays not all RPi displays will work with this library, so purchasing a RPi display of these types solely for use with this library is not recommended.

A "good" RPi display is the MHS-4.0 inch Display-B type ST7796 which provides good performance. This has a dedicated controller and can be clocked at up to 80MHz with the ESP32 (55MHz with STM32 and 40MHz with ESP8266). The MHS-3.5 inch RPi ILI9486 based display is also supported.

Some displays permit the internal TFT screen RAM to be read, a few of the examples use this feature. The TFT_Screen_Capture example allows full screens to be captured and sent to a PC, this is handy to create program documentation.

The library includes a "Sprite" class, this enables flicker free updates of complex graphics. Direct writes to the TFT with graphics functions are still available, so existing sketches do not need to be changed.

One or more sprites can be created, a sprite can be any pixel width and height, limited only by available RAM. The RAM needed for a 16 bit colour depth Sprite is (2 x width x height) bytes, for a Sprite with 8 bit colour depth the RAM needed is (width x height) bytes. Sprites can be created and deleted dynamically as needed in the sketch, this means RAM can be freed up after the Sprite has been plotted on the screen, more RAM intensive WiFi based code can then be run and normal graphics operations still work.

The "Animated_dial" example shows how dials can be created using a rotated Sprite for the needle. To run this example the TFT interface must support reading from the screen RAM (not all do). The dial rim and scale is a jpeg image, created using a paint program.

The XPT2046 touch screen controller is supported for SPI based displays only. The SPI bus for the touch controller is shared with the TFT and only an additional chip select line is needed. This support will eventually be deprecated when a suitable touch screen library is available.

The library supports SPI overlap on the ESP8266 so the TFT screen can share MOSI, MISO and SCLK pins with the program FLASH, this frees up GPIO pins for other uses. Only one SPI device can be connected to the FLASH pins and the chips select for the TFT must be on pin D3 (GPIO0).

The library is based on the Adafruit GFX and Adafruit driver libraries and the aim is to retain compatibility. Significant additions have been made to the library to boost the speed for the different 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 lots of example sketches to demonstrate the different features and included functions.

Configuration of the library font selections, pins used to interface with the TFT and other features is made by editing the User_Setup.h file in the library folder, or by selecting your own configuration in the "User_Setup_Selet,h" file. Fonts and features can easily be enabled/disabled by commenting out lines.

Anti-aliased (smooth) font files in "vlw" format are generated by the free Processing IDE using a sketch included in the library Tools folder. This sketch with the Processing IDE can be used to generate font files from your computer"s font set or any TrueType (.ttf) font, the font file can include any combination of 16 bit Unicode characters. This means Greek, Japanese and any other UCS-2 glyphs can be used. Character arrays and Strings in UTF-8 format are supported.

It would be possible to compress the vlw font files but the rendering performance to a TFT is still good when storing the font file(s) in SPIFFS, LittleFS or FLASH arrays.

Anti-aliased fonts can also be drawn over a gradient background with a callback to fetch the background colour of each pixel. This pixel colour can be set by the gradient algorithm or by reading back the TFT screen memory (if reading the display is supported).

Unfortunately the typical UNO/mcufriend TFT display board maps LCD_RD, LCD_CS and LCD_RST signals to the ESP32 analogue pins 35, 34 and 36 which are input only. To solve this I linked in the 3 spare pins IO15, IO33 and IO32 by adding wires to the bottom of the board as follows:

If you load a new copy of TFT_eSPI then it will overwrite your setups if they are kept within the TFT_eSPI folder. One way around this is to create a new folder in your Arduino library folder called "TFT_eSPI_Setups". You then place your custom setup.h files in there. After an upgrade simply edit the User_Setup_Select.h file to point to your custom setup file e.g.:

The library was intended to support only TFT displays but using a Sprite as a 1 bit per pixel screen buffer permits support for the Waveshare 2 and 3 colour SPI ePaper displays. This addition to the library is experimental and only one example is provided. Further examples will be added.