arduino 3.2 tft lcd touch shield drawing example price
Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (3.2" diagonal) bright (5 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240x320 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 FT6206 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 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 (UNO/Due/Mega 2560).
This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.
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.
Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big 4"(3.97" diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 480x800 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional resistive touch panel with controller XPT2046 and capacitive touch panel with FT6336.
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).
This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.
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.
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.
The next example is controlling an RGB LED using these three RGB sliders. For example if we start to slide the blue slider, the LED will light up in blue and increase the light as we would go to the maximum value. So the sliders can move from 0 to 255 and with their combination we can set any color to the RGB LED, but just keep in mind that the LED cannot represent the colors that much accurate.
The third example is a game. Actually it’s a replica of the popular Flappy Bird game for smartphones. We can play the game using the push button or even using the touch screen itself.
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.
Next we need to define the fonts that are coming with the libraries and also define some variables needed for the program. In the setup section we need to initiate the screen and the touch, define the pin modes for the connected sensor, the led and the button, and initially call the drawHomeSreen() custom function, which will draw the home screen of the program.
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.
Now we need to make the buttons functional so that when we press them they would send us to the appropriate example. In the setup section we set the character ‘0’ to the currentPage variable, which will indicate that we are at the home screen. So if that’s true, and if we press on the screen this if statement would become true and using these lines here we will get the X and Y coordinates where the screen has been pressed. If that’s the area that covers the first button we will call the drawDistanceSensor() custom function which will activate the distance sensor example. Also we will set the character ‘1’ to the variable currentPage which will indicate that we are at the first example. The drawFrame() custom function is used for highlighting the button when it’s pressed. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.
drawDistanceSensor(); // It is called only once, because in the next iteration of the loop, this above if statement will be false so this funtion won"t be called. This function will draw the graphics of the first example.
getDistance(); // Gets distance from the sensor and this function is repeatedly called while we are at the first example in order to print the lasest results from the distance sensor
So the drawDistanceSensor() custom function needs to be called only once when the button is pressed in order to draw all the graphics of this example in similar way as we described for the home screen. However, the getDistance() custom function needs to be called repeatedly in order to print the latest results of the distance measured by the sensor.
Ok next is the RGB LED Control example. If we press the second button, the drawLedControl() custom function will be called only once for drawing the graphic of that example and the setLedColor() custom function will be repeatedly called. In this function we use the touch screen to set the values of the 3 sliders from 0 to 255. With the if statements we confine the area of each slider and get the X value of the slider. So the values of the X coordinate of each slider are from 38 to 310 pixels and we need to map these values into values from 0 to 255 which will be used as a PWM signal for lighting up the LED. If you need more details how the RGB LED works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. The rest of the code in this custom function is for drawing the sliders. Back in the loop section we only have the back button which also turns off the LED when pressed.
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:
drawDistanceSensor(); // It is called only once, because in the next iteration of the loop, this above if statement will be false so this funtion won"t be called. This function will draw the graphics of the first example.
getDistance(); // Gets distance from the sensor and this function is repeatedly called while we are at the first example in order to print the lasest results from the distance sensor
I"m having problems with the touch screen using the URTouch.h library, I can calibrate the display using the calibration sketch - update URToughCD.h file with the calibration data but when I run the URTouch_ButtonTest sketch the Touch screen doesn"t respond correctly. I got the display and shield from Banggood.com which was suggested from a How to Mechatronics tutorial on a TFT display project.
No! For about the price of a familiar 2x16 LCD, you get a high resolution TFT display. For as low as $4 (shipping included!), it"s possible to buy a small, sharp TFT screen that can be interfaced with an Arduino. Moreover, it can display not just text, but elaborate graphics. These have been manufactured in the tens of millions for cell phones and other gadgets and devices, and that is the reason they are so cheap now. This makes it feasible to reuse them to give our electronic projects colorful graphic displays.
There are quite a number of small cheap TFT displays available on eBay and elsewhere. But, how is it possible to determine which ones will work with an Arduino? And what then? Here is the procedure:ID the display. With luck, it will have identifying information printed on it. Otherwise, it may involve matching its appearance with a picture on Google images. Determine the display"s resolution and the driver chip.
Find out whether there is an Arduino driver available. Google is your friend here. Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library works with many displays. (http://www.rinkydinkelectronics.com/library.php?i...)
Download and install the driver library. On a Linux machine, as root, copy the library archive file to the /usr/share/arduino/libraries directory and untar or unzip it.
Load an example sketch into the Arduino IDE, and then upload it to the attached Arduino board with wired-up TFT display. With luck, you will see text and/or graphics.
We"ll begin with a simple one. The ILI9163 display has a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. With 8 pins in a single row, it works fine with a standard Arduino UNO or with a Mega. The hardware hookup is simple -- only 8 connections total! The library put together by a smart fella, by the name of sumotoy, makes it possible to display text in multiple colors and to draw lines.
Note that these come in two varieties, red and black. The red ones may need a bit of tweaking to format the display correctly -- see the comments in the README.md file. The TFT_ILI9163C.h file might need to be edited.
It is 5-volt friendly, since there is a 74HC450 IC on the circuit board that functions as a level shifter. These can be obtained for just a few bucks on eBay and elsewhere, for example -- $3.56 delivered from China. It uses Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and it does a fine job with text and graphics. Note that due to the memory requirement of UTFT, this display will work with a standard UNO only with extensive tweaking -- it would be necessary to delete pretty much all the graphics in the sketch, and just stay with text.
This one is a 2.2" (diagonal) display with 176x220 resolution and parallel interface. It has a standard ("Intel 8080") parallel interface, and works in both 8-bit and 16-bit modes. It uses the S6D0164 driver in Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and because of the memory requirements of same, works only with an Arduino Mega or Due. It has an SD card slot on its back
This one is a bit of an oddball. It"s a clone of the more common HY-TFT240, and it has two rows of pins, set at right angles to one another. To enable the display in 8-bit mode, only the row of pins along the narrow edge is used. The other row is for the SD card socket on the back, and for 16-bit mode. To interface with an Arduino ( Mega or Due), it uses Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and the driver is ILI9325C. Its resolution is 320x240 (hires!) and it incorporates both a touch screen and an SD card slot.
Having determined that a particular TFT display will work with the Arduino, it"s time to think about a more permanent solution -- constructing hard-wired and soldered plug-in boards. To make things easier, start with a blank protoshield as a base, and add sockets for the TFT displays to plug into. Each socket row will have a corresponding row next to it, with each individual hole "twinned" to the adjacent hole in the adjoining row by solder bridges, making them accessible to jumpers to connect to appropriate Arduino pins. An alternative is hard-wiring the socket pins to the Arduino pins, which is neater but limits the versatility of the board.
The key to an effective DIY shield is a neat and logical layout. Sketching the prospective shield on quadrille (graph) paper may be helpful. A multitester or continuity tester might be useful for detecting wiring and soldering errors.
In step 5, you mention that the TFT01 display can"t be used with the UTFT library on an Arduino Uno because of its memory requirements. It can - all you have to do is edit memorysaver.h and disable any display models you"re not using.
I think you should add a disclaimer that the code might make the Arduino Uno unprogrammable afterward (due to use up the two 0 and 1 pin) and link to how to fix it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5290428/how-to-reset-an-arduino-board/8453576?sfb=2#84535760
Tho I realize this is quickly becoming legacy hardware, these 8,16 bit parallel spi with 4 wire controller 3.2in Taft touch display 240x380. It has become very inexpensive with ally of back stock world wide so incorporating them into any project is easier then ever. Sorry to my question. I’m having difficulty finding wiring solution for this lcd. It is a sd1289 3.3 and 5v ,40 pin parallel 8,16 bit. I do not want to use a extra shield,hat or cape or adapter. But there’s a lot of conflicting info about required lvl shifters for this model any help or links to info would be great .. thank you. I hope I gave enough information to understand what I’m adoing
#1 you need a data sheet for the display and pinout and the i/o board attached to the cable.Than before you buy check for a driver for this chip Raydium/RM69071.if no driver lib are you able to write one and do you have the necessary tools to work on this scale to wire it up ..if you answer no than search for an arduino ready product.WCH0
hooking up and adding a lib is no piece of cake insure the screen you buy is arduino ready and sold by a reputable shop with step by step directions...WCH0
I"m sorry that I can"t help you with this. You"ll have to do your own research. See if you can identify the chipset and find out if there"s an Arduino driver for it.0
Thanks for the wealth of knowledge! It is amazing at what is possible with items the average person can easily acquire. I hope to put some of your tips to use this winter as I would like to build sensors and other items for home automation and monitoring. Being able to have small displays around the house in addition to gathering and controlling things remotely will help the family see room conditions without going to the computer. The idea of a touchscreen control for cheap is mind blowing.
Touchscreen displays are everywhere! Phones, tablets, self-serve kiosks, bank machines and thousands of other devices we interact with make use of touchscreen displays to provide an intuitive user interface.
Today we will learn how touchscreens work, and how to use a common inexpensive resistive touchscreen shield for the Arduino. Future videos and articles will cover capacitive touchscreens, as well as a touchscreen HAT for the Raspberry Pi.
Although touchscreens seem to be everywhere these days we tend to forget that just a few decades ago these devices were just science fiction for most of us. For many people, the touchscreen concept was introduced 30 years ago in the television seriesStar Trek: The Next Generation.
Eric A Johnson, a researcher at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern UK is credited for describing and then prototyping the first practical touchscreen. HIs device was a capacitive touchscreen, and it’s first commercial use was on air traffic control screens. However, the touchscreens used then were not transparent, instead, they were mounted on the frame of the CRT display.
In 1972, a group at the University of Illinois filed for a patent on an optical touchscreen. This device used a 16×16 array of LEDs and phototransistors, mounted on a frame around a CRT display. Placing your finger, or another solid object, on the screen would break two of the light beams, this was used to determine the position and respond accordingly.
The first transparent touchscreen was developed atCERNin 1973. CERN is also home to the Large Hadron Collider, and this is where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
The first resistive touchscreen was developed by American inventor George Samuel Hurst in 1975, although the first practical version was not produced until 1982.
In 1982 theUniversity of Toronto’sInput Research Group developed the first multi-touch touchscreen, a screen that could interpret more than one touch at the same time. The original device used a video camera behind a frosted piece of glass. Three years later the same group developed a multi-touch tablet that used a capacitive touchscreen instead.
The first commercial product to use a touchscreen was a point-of-sale terminal developed by Atari and displayed at the 1986 COMDEX expo in Las Vegas. The next year Casio launched theCasio PB-1000 pocket computerwith a touchscreen consisting of a simple 4×4 matrix.
LG created the world’s first capacitive touchscreen phone, theLG Pradaused a capacitive touchscreen and was released in early 2007. A few weeks later Apple released its first iPhone.
Most early touchscreen devices were resistive, as this technology is generally less expensive than capacitive screens. However, nowadays capacitive screens are more common, being used in the majority of smartphones and tablets.
Although they were invented after capacitive touchscreens, resistive touchscreens are probably the most common type used by hobbyists. The reason for that is the price and performance, resistive touchscreens are cheaper than capacitive ones and they are generally more accurate.
A resistive touchscreen consists of two thin layers of material, separated by a tiny gap. Spacers are used to maintain the gap and keep the two sheets apart.
In a 4-Wire Analog touchscreen, there are two electrodes or “busbars” on each of the conductive layers. On one layer these electrodes are mounted on the two X-axis sides, the other layer has them on the two y-axes.
This is the most inexpensive method of designing a resistive touchscreen. The touchscreen display that we will be working with today uses this arrangement.
In a 5-Wire Analog touchscreen, there are four wires, one connected to a circular electrode on each corner of the bottom layer. A fifth wire is connected to a “sensing wire”, which is embedded in the top layer.
Touching any point on the screen causes current to flow to each of the bottom electrodes, measuring all four electrode currents determines the position that the screen was touched.
This 8-Wire Analog touchscreen uses an arrangement of electrodes identical to the 4-Wire variety. The difference is that there are two wires connected to each electrode, one to each end.
Capacitive touchscreens are actually older technology than resistive displays. They are commonly used in phones and tablets, so you’re probably familiar with them.
The capacitive touchscreen makes use of the conductivity of the human body. The touchscreen itself consists of a glass plate that has been treated with a conductive material.
The surface capacitive touchscreen is the most inexpensive design, so it is widely used. It consists of four electrodes placed at each corner of the touchscreen, which maintain a level voltage over the entire conductive layer.
This is a more advanced touchscreen technique. In a projected capacitive touchscreen transparent electrodes are placed along the protective glass coating and are arranged in a matrix.
One line of electrodes (vertical) maintain a constant level of current. Another line (horizontal) are triggered when your finger touches the screen and initiates current flow in that area of the screen. The electrostatic field created where the two lines intersect determine where it was touched.
The module we will be experimenting with today is a very common Arduino Shield, which is rebranded by many manufacturers. You can easily find these on Amazon, eBay or at your local electronics shop.
You can also just use the shield as an LCD display and ignore the two other components, however, if you intend on doing that it would be cheaper just to buy an LCD display without any touchscreen features.
This is a TFT orThin Film Transistordevice that uses liquid crystals to produce a display. These displays can produce a large number of colors with a pretty decent resolution.
You do need to be looking directly at the display for best color accuracy, as most of these inexpensive LCD displays suffer from distortion and “parallax error” when viewed from the side. But as the most common application for a device like this is as a User Interface (UI) this shouldn’t be a problem.
This shield uses a 4-wire analog resistive touchscreen, as described earlier. Two of the wires (one X and one Y) are connected to a couple of the analog inputs on the Arduino. The analog inputs are required as the voltage levels need to be measured to determine the position of the object touching the screen.
You should note that the microSD card uses the SPI interface and is wired for the Arduino Uno. While the rest of the shield will function with an Arduino Mega 2560, the SPI connections on the Mega are different, so the microSD card will not work.
The last paragraph regarding the microSD card may make you think that an Arduino Uno is the best choice for the Touchscreen Display Shield. And it you require the microSD card then it probably is a good choice.
But using an Arduino Uno with this shield does have one big disadvantage – a limited number of free I/O pins. In fact there are only three pins left over once the card has been plugged in:
If your product is self-contained and doesn’t need many (or any) I/O pins then you’ll be fine. But if you need more pins to interface with then an Arduino Mega 2560 is a much better choice. It has a lot of additional analog and digital pins.
So if you don’t require the microSD card, or are willing to hook up a separate microSD card, then the Arduino Mega 2560 is a better choice for most applications.
As there are three devices on the shield you will need libraries for each of the ones you want to use. TheSD Libraryis already installed in your Arduino IDE, so you will just need libraries for the display and touchscreen.
For the LCD you will have a lot of choices in libraries. Most of these shields come with a CD ROM with some sketches and libraries, so you can use the LCD libraries there. Bear in mind however that code on these CD ROMs tends to be a little dated, you may have better lick on the vendors website.
This useful resource contains code, libraries and datasheets for a wealth of LCD displays, both touchscreen and non-touchscreen. You’ll also find code for some common OLED displays as well.
I ran my touchscreen through all of the code samples I obtained from the LCD Wiki. It’s an interesting exercise, and by examining the sketch for each demo you can learn a lot about programming the display.
The first example is a very simple color “sweep” test. Navigate to theExample_01_Simple_testfolder and open the folder for your Arduino controller. Navigate down until you find the “ino” file and load it.
This test does not make use of any of the extra libraries, it drives the LCD directly. It is only a test of the LCD display, it does not make use of the touchscreen membrane.
You’ll find this example in theExample_02_clear_screenfolder, the sameclear_Screen.inoexample is used for both the Uno and Mega so there are no separate folders.
This example does use the custom libraries, and is a very good way to learn how to use them. You’ll note that theLCDWIKI_GUI.hlibrary is loaded, which is the graphics library for the LCD display.
Another library, LCDWIKI_KBV.h, is loaded as well. This is a hardware-specific “helper” library that provides an interface to the actual hardware for the other libraries.
When you run this example the results will be similar to the first one, a series of colors will sweep across the screen. In this case the colors are different, and they vary in speed.
A look at the loop will show how this is done. TheLCDWIKI_GUI.hlibrary has a “Fill_Screen” method that fills the screen with an RGB color. You can specify the color in both hexadecimal or decimal format, the example illustrates both ways.
The example itself is in a folder labeled “Example_03_colligate_test” and the code itself is in the colligate_test.ino file. I suspect a translation error resulted in the name!
This sketch uses a number of functions from theLCDWIKI_GUI.hlibrary, along with some custom functions to draw geometric shapes. It then displays a cycle of graphs, shapes, and patterns on the LCD display.
This example makes use of a second file that contains fonts. The Display Scroll sketch illustrates a number of different methods of scrolling characters, in different fonts, colors and even languages.
Unlike the previous examples that put the text in with a number of graphics, this example is a pretty simple one with just a block of text in different sizes and colors. This makes it very simple to understand how the text is positioned on the display.
In addition to the graphics and “helper” libraries that have been used in the previous examples this sketch also uses theTouchScreenlibrary to read screen interaction. This was one of the libraries included in the original ZIP file.
As its name would imply, this sketch displays a bitmap image on the display. The images need to be placed onto the root of a microSD card, which in turn is plugged into the socket on the display shield.
Note that this demo will only work on the Arduino Uno, as the microSD card uses the SPI bus and is wired to the Arduino Uno SPI port. The Arduino Mega 2560 board uses different pins for SPI.
Another thing you will notice is the speed at which the images draw, which is not particularly impressive. The clock speed of the Arduino has a lot to do with this, as does the method used to extract each individual pixel from the image.
This example draws some small “switches” on the display. The switches are active and respond to touch. There are slide switches, a push button, some radio buttons and some text-based expandable menus to test with.
The Touch Pen example is actually a pretty decent little drawing application. You can draw whatever you want on the main screen area. A set of buttons allow you to set the stylus color and pen width.
While the sample code is a bit difficult to follow it’s worth the effort, as it shows you how to create a dynamic menu system. Touching the stylus color button, for example, will open a new menu to select colors. This is a handy technique that you’ll need to know when developing your own user interfaces.
The Calibration utility lets you calibrate the resistive touchscreen. It achieves this by placing a number of crosses on the screen. You can calibrate the screen by using the stylus to touch the center of one of the crosses as accurately as you can.
After you touch one of the cross points the sketch runs through a calibration sequence, during which time you need to continue to touch the cross point. You’ll be informed when it is finished.
After calibration, the sketch will display a number of calibration values for the resistive touchscreen. These values can be used in your future sketches to make the touchscreen more accurate.
The examples are a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of your touchscreen. But to really put your interface to work you’ll need to write your own interface code.
Writing a touchscreen interface can be challenging. I would suggest that you start by modifying one of the example codes, one that is closest to your desired interface.
For my experiment, I will be using an Arduino Mega 2560 to drive three LEDs. I used a Red, Green and Blue LED but really any colors will work – I just wanted my LED colors to match my button colors.
The digital I/O connector at the back of the Mega is still accessible even when the touchscreen display shield is installed, so I used three of those connections for the LEDs. I hooked up each LED anode through a 220-ohm dropping resistor and connected them as follows:
TheAdafruit TFTLCD Libraryis used. It uses the previous library to provide an easy method of drawing on the LCD display. It works with LCD displays that use driver chips like the ILI9325 and ILI9328.
TheTouchScreenlibrary comes in the code that you downloaded from the LCD Wiki or from the CD ROM included with your touchscreen shield. As its name implies it is used to interface with the touchscreen.
TheMCUFRIEND_kbvlibrary is also included in the software you obtained for your display shield. It takes care of supplying the correct hardware information for your display shield to the other libraries.
Next, we define some touchscreen parameters. You can ‘fine-tune” your code here by using parameters from your own display, which you can obtain from the Calibration Sketch we ran from the sample code. Otherwise, just use the values here and you should be fine.
Now, still in the Setup, we set up the LCD display rotation and fill the background in black. Next step is to draw our buttons. Once we are done that the Setup is finished, and our screen should be displaying the three buttons on a black background.
We start by triggering the touchscreen, which is done by toggling pin 13 on the Arduino high. If something is touching the screen we read it and assign it to a TSPoint object named “p”.
We then need to reset the pin modes for two of the touchscreen pins back to outputs. This is done as these pins get shared with other LCD display functions and get set as inputs temporarily.
Load the code into your Arduino IDE and upload it to your Arduino Mega 2560. Make sure you have the correct processor-type set in your Arduino IDE, especially if you are used to working with the Uno!
This is a pretty simple demo but it does illustrate how to create a simple IDE. You can expand upon it to add more buttons, or to change the button colors or shapes. And, of course, you don’t have to light LEDs with your buttons, they can control anything that you can connect to your Arduino.
Touchscreen interfaces are used in a number of products, and now you can design your own devices using them. They can really make for an intuitive and advanced display and will give your project a very professional “look and feel” if done correctly.
This is not the only time we will look at touchscreen displays. Next time we’ll examine a capacitive touchscreen and we’ll explore the Adafruit Graphics libraries further to create some very fancy displays with controls and indicators.
Let"s learn how to use a touchscreen with the Arduino. We will examine the different types of touchscreens and will then create a simple interface using an inexpensive Arduino touchscreen shield.
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.
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:
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.
We know that we could find many examples for Arduino and TFT LCD to work together, Arduino UNO with 2.8"/3.2" TFT screen, or Arduino Mega with 2.8"/5.0" TFT screen. They are all working very well. However, if you play with it, you may find they are rather blunt, not swift enough to show a picture quickly. In fact, we"ve made some TFT shields for Arduino Uno/Mega ever. But we feel they are all not good enough.
Why ? You know, Arduino UNO/Mega works on 8-bit ATMega328/1280/2560. Those chips are not powerful enough for TFT screen. While Arduino Due comes, we feel that: oh, it is the time !
Arduino Due is based on 32-bit ARM processor, and it is much more powerful than Arduino UNO/Mega. So if you play Arduino DUE and TFT, you feel everything abviously runs faster than Arduino Mega. You could display a picture shortly.
Our shield is designed for Arduino DUE. It is not compatible with Arduino Mega/Mega2560. Please DO NOT insert it to Arduino Mega/Mega2560. Otherwise the TFT Screen might be damaged.
Our TFT shield doesn"t cover all the female pins like most of other TFT shield. We know that sometimes we need other modules connected with Arduino at the same time. To make things easier, our designing also leaves space for a Sensor Shield. Users don"t need to spend much time on wiring.
This library enables an Arduino board to communicate with the Arduino TFT LCD screen. It simplifies the process for drawing shapes, lines, images, and text to the screen.
The display demand for every project is unique, a project may require just a simple, single character OLED display, while another project may require something bigger, all based on the function the display is to perform. For this reason, as a maker or electronics hobbyist, anyone needs to know how to work with as many displays as possible, that’s why today, we will take a look at how to use the super cheap, 3.2″ color TFT display with Arduino.
For this tutorial, we will use the 3.2″ TFT display from banggood. The display which is based on the HX8357B LCD Controller, supports 16-wire DataBus interface and comes with 262K color at 480 x 320 resolution. The module includes an SD card socket, an SPI FLASH circuit and a 5V-3.3V power and Logic Level conversion circuit which makes it easy to use with any microcontroller that uses either 5v or 3.3v logic voltage level. The module can be directly inserted into an Arduino Mega or Due board.
To demonstrate how the display works, we will use the UTFT LCD library for Arduino to display some images and text on the display including an animated graph. All these will show how the display could be used for something like an oscilloscope.
These components can each be bought via the links attached. The 3.2″ TFT display, as at the time I bought it was listed on the website as a 3″ display but after buying and measuring, the size of the display is 3.2″.
The display comes in a shield form, which means it can be plugged directly into the Arduino with which it is going to be used, as such, no schematic is needed. Plug the display into your Arduino Mega or Due as shown in the image below.
To achieve the goals of this tutorial, we will use a simple sample code attached to the UTFT library. The UTFT library is a library created to facilitate easy interaction between a microcontroller and several LCD displays. Unfortunately, the latest versions of the UTFT library has no support for the HX8357B LCD controller which is used to our 3.2″ TFT display. To go round this hurdle, we will be installing a previous version of the library on the Arduino IDE.
The wonderful library written by Henning Karlsen can be downloaded from the link below. The libraries are pre-built for each Arduino board so choose the right one that matches the board you are using from the link below.
Use your favorite library installation method to install the library after downloading and launch an Instance of the Arduino IDE. With the IDE opened, click on file, select examples, select UTFT then select the Display Demo or the UTFT_Demo_480x320 example.
We will attempt to do a brief explanation of the code. The code starts by setting the speed (the wait variable) at which it runs to 2000. This speed can be reduced to zero so the demo can play slowly. After this, we include the utft library and invoke the custom library for the for Arduino Due.
with that done, we proceed to the void setup() function. Under the setup() function, we initialize the LCD using the init command and we ensure the LCD display is on landscape using the set rotation function with a value of 1.
Upload the code to your Arduino board and you should see the display come up after a few minutes, displaying texts, and different other graphics. A view of the display in action is shown in the image below.
You can use either of the two Arduino boards mentioned above for this tutorial. The Arduino due is faster than the Arduino mega so it will run the code faster than the mega. For instance, on the Arduino Due, the code took 23 seconds to get to the end while on the Arduino Mega, it took 44 seconds to get to the end confirming the speed of the Due.
ILI9341 is a 262,144-color single-chip SOC driver for a-TFT liquid crystal display with resolution of 240RGBx320 dots, comprising a 720-channel source driver, a 320-channel gate driver, 172,800 bytes GRAM for graphic display data of 240RGBx320 dots, and power supply circuit. ILI9341 supports parallel 8-/9-/16-/18-bit data bus MCU interface, 6-/16-/18-bit data bus RGB interface and 3-/4-line serial peripheral interface (SPI). The moving picture area can be specified in internal GRAM by window address function. The specified window area can be updated selectively, so that moving picture can be displayed simultaneously independent of still picture area.
You can find ILI9341-based TFT displays in various sizes on eBay and Aliexpress. The one I chose for this tutorial is 2.2″ length along the diagonal, 240×320 pixels resolution, supports SPI interface, and can be purchased for less than $10.
Note that we will be using the hardware SPI module of the ESP8266 to drive the TFT LCD. The SPI communication pins are multiplexed with I/O pins D5 (SCK), D6 (MISO), and D7 (MOSI). The chip select (CS) and Data/Command (DC) signal lines are configurable through software.
For ILI9341-based TFT displays, there are some options for choosing the library for your application. The most common one is using Bodmer. We will use this library in this tutorial. So go ahead and download the
The library is based on the Adafruit GFX and Adafruit ILI9341 libraries and the aim is to retain compatibility. Significant additions have been made to the library to boost the speed for ESP8266 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 a significant number of example sketches to demonstrate the different features.
Configuration of the library font selections, pins used to interface with the TFT and other features is made by editting the User_Setup.h file in the library folder. Fonts and features can easily be disabled by commenting out lines.
Now you are all set to try out tons of really cool built-in examples that come with the library. The following output corresponds to the TFT_Pie_Chart example.
My favorite example is TFT terminal, which implements a simple “Arduino IDE Serial Monitor” like serial receive terminal for monitoring debugging messages from another Arduino or ESP8266 board.