arduino tft display clock brands

Time is a critical element of our existence that will never get old, and with technology, we can find better and more intuitive ways to measure it. In one of our past tutorials, we looked at how the DS3231 real time clock module can be used with Arduino to display time on a 16×2 LCD display. Today, we will build an upgrade to that project using an Arduino Due, the DS3231 RTC module and a 3.2″colour TFT display in place of the 16×2 LCD display used in the previous project.

At the heart of today’s project is the DS3231 real time clock module which we will use to obtain the current time, date and temperature of the environment. The DS3231 real time clock module is one of the most popular real-time clock chips among makers and DIY enthusiasts. It is a low-cost, highly accurate, I2Cbased real-time clock (RTC) with a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) and crystal integrated into it.  The module integrates a coin cell battery input which helps it retain date and time even when the main power to the device is interrupted. It maintains seconds, minutes, hours, day, date, month, and year information, automatically adjusting the date for months with fewer than 31 days, including corrections for leap year. It can be set to operate either in the 24-hour or 12-hour format with an active-low AM/PM indicator. It has been used in several projects on this website mostly, due to its accuracy, and its low power requirements which help it keep time accurately, for a longer period of time compared to other real-time clocks (RTC) modules.

Another key part/component that we will use in today’s tutorial is the Arduino Due. One of the important things, when designing electronic systems that have displays is ensuring, that there is no flicker or lag when updating information on the screen and one of the best ways to ensure that, is to use a fast enough micro-controller. Putting this into consideration, for this project, we will use the very fast Arduino Due board. The Arduino Due has one of the fastest CPU in the Arduino family. The Due runs on an 84MHz CPU compared to the 16MHz CPU speed of the Arduino UNO, and as such, it is able to update the screen without any visible flickering.

The most important update to the previous project, however, is the 3.2″color LCD display being used. The display gives us the ability to create a better, bigger and colourful user interface for our clock at a cheap price as it costs about 7$ on banggood.

The goal for this project is to build a real-time clock with a user-friendly interface capable of displaying (without lag or flickering) the current time, date, temperature including the minimum and maximum temperature recorded in a particular environment over time.

The 3.2″ TFT, like most other TFT displays, comes as a shield which can be easily mounted on the Arduino Due. This, however, makes it difficult to access the IOs of the Arduino after the display has been mounted, as it tends to cover the front face of the board. To solve this, so that the DS3231 module can be connected, male headers are used (after bending them as shown in the picture below) to connect the RTC module to the Arduino.

To easily write the code for this project, we will use two libraries: the Bodmer TFT HX8537  library for the TFT display and the Sodaq DS3231 library to easily interface with the DS3231 module. Both libraries can be downloaded via the links attached to their names above. The Bodmer library is a version of the UTFT library specially modified for the Arduino Due as this particular display is incompatible with the UTFT library.

Next is the void setup function. We initiate communication with the RTC module and Initialize the display, setting our preferred orientation for the display and print the UI to the display.

With this done, we move to the void loop function. Under this function, we write the code to update all the parameters (after specific intervals) on the display including the min temperature, the max temperature, time and the date.

That’s it for this tutorial guys, there are several useful projects that can be built using this tutorial as a foundation. You could decide to add a buzzer to the project to create an alarm clock or make a to-do list based project, all out of this.

Nothing can be compared when you can put your hard work to display on a 4” TFT display- From one end to the other end it"s 480*360 pixel to play with. 4” TFT Analog-GPS clock on Arduino

Every electronic hobbyist dreams to display his work on display – be it LCD, GLCD (64*128), OLED or TFT . LCDs are the oldest type of displays. If putting your work on LCD or GLCD is great then putting it on OLED is certainly greater but nothing can be compared when you can put your hard work to display on a 4” TFT display. From one end to the other end it"s 480*360 pixel to put up with and it"s very very impressive.

The latest Chinese TFT displays are very cheap and works perfectly with Arduino & Raspberry Pi. The TFT ILI9488 display costs about $8 on aliexpress.com. There are two varieties available one with 26 pins 13*2 DIL and the other is with pins aligned exactly to sit on an UNO board.

Arduino style – Directly sits exactly on an Arduino UNO board. The major disadvantage is that once it sits on an UNO board one can hardly use any other GPIO pins for other usages. Both these styles I"ve used for creating art works on Arduino & Raspberry Pi. The Arduino type has an extra SDCard attached and gets connected to the SPI (D-10,11,12,13) pins when inserted.

Hurdles:The main hurdles that I faced with these type of displays is that they are not common and all are made by mcufrends.com. Fortunately the mcufriends.com itself has made and freely distributed the MCUFRIEND_kbd.h header files which works out of the box for these displays and many other type of similar displays. The other header file that are required for this displays are Adafruit_GFX.h [both these header files are added in the archieve]

While the pin connections of the Arduino type is pretty clear and straight forward the same on Raspberry Pi type is not clear at all. However, here"s my hard work for you to make your life easy ! [See the connection diagram for both the types]

While the Arduino type shield is fairly easy to connect but difficult to attach other devices , the Raspberry Pi type shield is little difficult to find out the pin details but it has extremely easy & compact interface while fitted up . Here"s the 26 pin DIL pin details which will go to the same pins of Arduino.

These shields are basically for 3.3 volt operations. But upto 5 volt it works , However, prolong operation on 5 volt is not recommended as it gets heated up profusely. In case you want to free some other Arduino pins then you look into the mcufriend_shield.h file and re-write the connections as I shifted some connections to alternate pins.

Construction:The possibilities are limitless when you can tie up the display so easily. Here"s a GPS ana-digital clock with temperature indicator built with the following Bill Of Materials.

The connections are easy as shown in the schematic diagrams. Since all the top portion of the UNO is covered by the TFT shield, the connections for the LM-35, GPS receiver is taken from the bottom side of the UNO shield.

Software: This is real fun ! With small strokes of code the TFT behaves differently and opens up many different ways of displaying the output. Creating a thick line, making the hands move smoothly was real challenge as the Adafruit_GFX is not so much developed but a look back to the high school trigonometry is all that you need to make it all happen for you.

Operation:The present GPS receivers which have a built in patch antenna on top ,can locate the LEO GPS satellite very easily if you have your windows are open or glass covered. The moment it locates 2 such satellites ,the time starts ticking on the analog dial. At the same time the time is shown digitally on the right side with the temperature display at the bottom. For temperature sensor I"ve used a TMP36 sensor which works on 3.3 volt. However, an LM35 can also be used but you have to have 5volt supply for that.

When you are using DS1302, DS1307 or DS3231 RTC in your real time clock project, You may have observed it’s library works on 24 hours format clock. If you are like me who don’t like to see clock in 24 hour format, this tutorial is for you. we will learn how to set 12 hour clock in RTC (Real Time Clock) using DS1302 with TFT Display. It is simple to convert from 24 hour format to 12 hour format clock by using any of DS1302, DS1307 or DS3231 RTC. In short we are subtracting 12 hours from 24 hours. So let’s get started.

Download library forReal Time Clock libraryfrom Rinky-Dink Electronics  OR you can download it from here because library may change by the time or it may not work.

The latest Chinese TFT displays are quite low in price but work perfectly with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. There are two different types of TFT shields available: one with 26 pins (13×2 DIL) for Raspberry Pi and the other as Arduino TFT shield for Arduino Uno board.

Arduino TFT shield can be perfectly mounted on top of an Arduino Uno board. But a major disadvantage is that after mounting the shield on Arduino Uno board, it is difficult to use its GPIO pins for any other application.

The Arduino TFT shield has a micro SD card attached that gets connected to its serial peripheral interface (SPI) pins for communication with the microcontroller. This micro SD card is not used in this project.

The main hurdle with this display is that it is not common and is available only from mcufriend.com. Fortunately, the mcufriend_kbd.h header file is freely available and it works out of the box for this and many other similar displays. The other header file required for this display is Adafruit_GFX.h. Both these header files, along with the main source code, are given below.

This project creates an analogue dial clock along with digital date, time and temperature display using an LM35/TMP36 temperature sensor. The time signal is derived from a U-Blox NEO-6M GPS receiver module. Once the technique is understood, it can be deployed for many other applications.

The connections are easy to make as shown in Fig. 2. The pin connections of the Arduino TFT shield are straightforward; you just need to mount the shield on top of the Arduino Uno board. The pin-to-pin connection details between TFT shield and Arduino Uno are given in the table.

Since top portion of the Arduino Uno is covered by TFT shield, the connections for the TMP36 and GPS receiver are taken from the bottom side of the Arduino Uno board (refer Fig. 3). In case you want to free some Arduino pins then you should see the mcufriend_shield.h file and re-write the connections to do so.

Writing the Arduino code/sketch (GPS_analog_clock.ino) for the project is real fun! You can make TFT display in many different ways through coding. Creating a thick border line, making the hour and minutes hands move smoothly were quite challenging as Adafruit_GFX library is not so much developed. High school trigonometry is all that you need to make it happen for you.

After uploading the code, solder the pins of TMP36 and GPS module to the Arduino board. Then mount the TFT shield on top of the Arduino board. After all the connections are done as per Fig. 2, connect it to 3.3V DC source. GPS module requires a few minutes to trace the satellites.

Most GPS receivers have an inbuilt patch antenna that can locate the low Earth orbit (LEO) GPS satellites very easily, even if your room’s windows are closed. As soon as two such satellites are located, the time starts appearing on the analogue dial. At the same time, the date, time and temperature are shown digitally on right side of the TFT display.

Clock is my fascination. I have made clocks of several variety & themes but I never made any clock which have millisecond display. The reason being the huge load of processing power which always falls short for the demand of fast changing display.

However, the first success came when I successfully could run the 3.5” ILI9488 TFT display on 8 bit mode with ESP32. On 8 bit mode it needs 12 GPIO pins to run the display and it is really very fast and there lies the success of this millisecond display clock.

Although the TFT display fits very easily on an Arduino UNO but this millisecond display is not possible on Arduino UNO as it lacks the computing power.

The time is calculated from the RTC DS3231. This RTC have capability of measuring temperature as well which is also displayed on the TFT. The time duration between consecutive seconds is divided by 1000 to calculate the millisecond and displayed on the TFT. The simple line drawing is tricked to created thick line which is put into variable function.

This is a very low-power LCD clock, based on an AVR128DA48, capable of running for over three years from a CR2032 button cell, or for ever from a solar cell:

Every minute it also briefly displays the temperature, using the AVR128DA48"s on-chip temperature sensor, and the battery voltage, by using the ADC to read its own supply voltage. There"s also an I2C connection so you can add an external sensor, for example to show the humidity in addition to the other readings.

Although liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are relatively old technology, they still offer several advantages over newer types of display, including low power, low cost, and readability.

I recently bought some Densitron LCD displays on eBay for a few pounds/dollars, and I"d been wanting to try building a low-power clock around them, to see just how low I could get the power consumption. The displays are a standard type, available with compatible pinouts from several manufacturers. They are called static (as opposed to multiplexed), which means that every segment comes to a separate pin on the edge connector. This makes 28 pins for the segments plus three decimal points, a colon, and a common pin, adding up to 33 pins altogether. The displays I"ve found usually have two common pins, and also typically have other special-purpose segments, such as a minus sign, in a 40-pin package.

The displays are usually clear, but when you apply a voltage of about 3.3V between a segment and the common line the segment turns black. The displays I"m using have a reflective backing; they are also available with a translucent backing so you can add a backlight behind them.

There"s one catch; you can"t use a DC voltage to turn on the segments, because this would cause electrolysis to occur which would slowly degrade the display. The solution is to use AC by switching the polarity across the segment at a low frequency; 32Hz is usually recommended. Fortunately this is easy to do in software

Most 40-pin, 33mm row spacing displays should be compatible with this board; here are some I"ve found. These all have 4 digits and 3 decimal points on pins 5 to 27, 29 to 32, and 34 to 37, and commons on 1 and 40, plus a few extra symbols as shown:

Because of the number of interconnections I didn"t fancy prototyping this project by hand, but went straight to designing a PCB in Eagle, and I sent it to PCBWay for manufacture. I tried to make the PCB as general purpose as possible. It caters for any of the displays in the above table; to select which of the extra symbols you want to display you need to fit an 0Ω resistor to the board to act as a link.

Alternatively, if you want to power the clock from a 3V solar cell there are holes to allow you to fit a supercapacitor in place of the coin cell; I used a PowerStor 0.47F 5V one

The PCB also includes a 4-pin JST PH socket, providing an I2C interface compatible with Adafruit"s STEMMA system or the Grove system. You can use this to connect a sensor to the board, for example to show the humidity as well as the time and temperature, or you could use it to make the board an I2C slave so it can be used as an I2C display for other projects.

There"s no multiplexing, so to display a segment pattern we just need to write the appropriate value from the segment array, Char[0] to Char[11], to the port corresponding to the digit. Ports D, C, and A provide eight I/O lines each, so these map in a logical way to the seven segments and decimal point in digits 0 to 2. There"s a slight complexity with digit 3 because Port B only has six I/O lines available, so the segment corresponding to bit 6 is provided by PF5. The colon or other symbol is controlled by PF4.

The clock uses the Real-Time Clock (RTC) peripheral controlled by a 32.768kHz crystal to keep accurate time. The code to set up the RTC is almost identical to my earlier projects Mega Tiny Time Watch [Updated] and Big Time. It is configured as a Periodic Interrupt Timer (PIT), generating a regular interrupt. In this project I"ve used a divisor of 512, which divides down the 32.768kHz crystal to give 64 interrupts a second.

The interrupt service routine first toggles all the I/O lines connected to the LCD segments, and the common connections. Every 32 calls, or every half second, it calculates the current time, and checks whether the buttons are pressed. If the MINS or HRS buttons are pressed it advances the time by a minute or an hour respectively. It then calls the routine DisplayTime() to update the time, or at the end of each minute it calls DisplayVoltage() to display the battery voltage for three seconds, followed by DisplayTemp() to display the temperature for three seconds:

DisplayTime() copies the digits representing the current time to the corresponding output ports, specified by Digit[0] to Digit[3]. It also flashes the colon:

Unlike earlier AVR microcontrollers, where you had to calibrate the temperature sensor, the AVR DA and DB series have been calibrated during manufacture and contain calibration parameters in ROM. The temperature display is therefore pretty accurate without any additional calibration.

The processor spends most of its time in power-down sleep mode, to save power, and is woken up by the 64Hz interrupt from the Real-Time Clock peripheral. I measured the average power consumption at 3.3V for four different clock frequencies:

Usually you"d expect the power consumption to increase with processor clock frequency, so at first sight these figures are puzzling. The explanation is that at higher clock frequencies the time taken to execute the interrupt service routine is shorter, allowing the processor to spend a higher proportion of the time asleep.

The 32.768kHz external crystal oscillator has a low-power mode, and selecting this reduced the average power consumption with a 24MHz clock from 9.5µA to 7.3µA. The AVR128DA48 datasheet doesn"t seem to mention any downside to choosing the low-power mode, so I used this setting.

A CR2032 coin cell has a typical capacity of 225 mAh, so with a consumption of 7.3µA the expected battery life of the clock is 225/0.0073/24/365 or about 3.5 years.

With a 0.47F supercapacitor you can expect a current of 0.47A for 1 second. This gives an expected life of 0.47/7.3x10‑6/60/60 or about 18 hours, which I confirmed by testing it. This should be sufficient to keep the clock running overnight with a suitable solar cell providing power during daylight.

Pressing the MINS button resets the seconds to zero; this is designed so you can set the clock to the precise second, such as from a radio timecode. To do this, set the minutes to the current minute, and at the timecode at the end of the minute step the minutes on by one.

The HRS button doesn"t affect the seconds and minutes timing; this is designed to allow you to switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time without affecting the clock setting.

Make a UPDI programmer from an Arduino Uno, or other ATmega328P-based board, as described in Make UPDI Programmer, and set the Programmer option to "jtag2updi".

When you are using DS1302, DS1307 or DS3231 RTC in your real time clock project, You may have observed it’s library works on 24 hours format clock. If you are like me who don’t like to see clock in 24 hour format, this tutorial is for you. we will learn how to set 12 hour clock in RTC (Real Time Clock) using DS1302 with TFT Display. It is simple to convert from 24 hour format to 12 hour format clock by using any of DS1302, DS1307 or DS3231 RTC. In short we are subtracting 12 hours from 24 hours. So let’s get started.

Download library for Real Time Clock library from Rinky-Dink Electronics  OR you can download it from here because library may change by the time or it may not work.

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.