tft lcd fritzing price

Hi guys, over the past few tutorials, we have been discussing TFT displays, how to connect and use them in Arduino projects, especially the 1.8″ Colored TFT display. In a similar way, we will look at how to use the 1.44″ TFT Display (ILI9163C) with the Arduino.

The ILI9163C based 1.44″ colored TFT Display, is a SPI protocol based display with a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. It’s capable of displaying up to 262,000 different colors. The module can be said to be a sibling to the 1.8″ TFT display, except for the fact that it is much faster and has a better, overall cost to performance ratio when compared with the 1.8″ TFT display. Some of the features of the display are listed below;

TheTFT Display, as earlier stated, communicates with the microcontroller over SPI, thus to use it, we need to connect it to the SPI pins of the Arduino as shown in the schematics below.

Please note that the version of the display used for this tutorial is not available on fritzing which is the software used for the schematics, so follow the pin connection list below to further understand how each pin of the TFT display should be connected to the Arduino.

In order to allow the Arduino to work with the display, we need two Arduino libraries; the sumotoy TFT ILI9163C Arduino library which can be downloaded from this link and the popular Adafruit GFX Arduino library which we have used extensively in several tutorials. Download these libraries and install them in the Arduino IDE.

For today’s tutorial, we will be using the bigtest example which is one of the example codes that comes with the sumotoy ILI9163C Arduino library to show how to use the TFT display.

The example can be opened by going to File–>Examples–>TFT_ILI9163c–>bigtest as shown in the image below. It should be noted that this will only be available after the sumotoy library has been installed.

Next, an object of the ILI9163c library named “display” was created with CS and DC parameter as inputs but due to the kind of display being used, we need to include the pin of the Arduino to which the A0 pin of the TFT display is connected which is D8.

Last episode, we continued learning about Arduino Fritzing prototype to production. We finished the alarm clock software by learning to make it more accurate. Then, we learned to roll our own Arduino using Fritzing by designing the Fritzingduino. To be a "real" clone, the Arduino requires a bootloader. So, this episode we will further amass knowledge about how to become more independent in our development by adding a bootloader ourselves using tools provided by the Arduino IDE. Following that, we will learn to make ourselves even more independent by using Fritzing to combine an Arduino shield design with the Fritzingduino into a single printed circuit board (PCB) design like the alarm clock shown in Figure 1.

One of our goals with the Fritzingduino is to save money. We can have an Arduino compliant system without having to purchase an Arduino and a shield since we can now design our own. To do this, we need an ATmega328 with an Arduino compliant bootloader on it.

If you only need a couple of ATmega328s with bootloaders, then buying them preprogrammed makes sense. If you’re going to be doing a bunch of Fritzingduino style projects, you"ll want to have your own tools for burning the bootloaders on to the chips.

First and foremost, having a known good Arduino system can radically reduce your debugging efforts as you build Fritzingduino systems. If something works on the "real" Arduino and doesn"t work on your Fritzingduino, it is probably the Fritzingduino"s fault.

You can use the Nuts & Volts web store as the basis for this project. Note that while a single ATmega328P is listed in the BOM, you"ll want to get as many ATmega328Ps as you think you"ll need for your future Fritzingduino projects.

One final caveat: This design works for the Atemga328. It may work for other 28-pin ATmegas, but you are going to have to figure that out yourself. There is a bit of Internet chatter on how to modify the original ArduinoISP design and associated files to do this, but since I"m only interested in rolling my own Arduino with the Fritzingduino concept, I"m not interested in pursuing other ATmegas at the moment.

We"ve discussed the economies of rolling our own Arduino with the Fritzingduino, and we can extend those economies by adding our shield designs to our Fritzingduino so that we have a single PCB and don"t need those male/female shield connectors. For example, we"ve learned to design an alarm clock for an Arduino shield. We could add that shield design to our Fritzingduino and have the whole thing on a single PCB, thus saving us the cost of the Arduino, the shield, and all those headers.

Since we want to get this all on a single PCB, we don"t need standard Arduino headers to accommodate a shield — there is no shield. First, we want to create a Fritzingduino base design that has no headers. Figure 10 shows a schematic view for such a design; Figure 11 shows the PCB view.

We call this the Fritzingduino_No_Shield and as you can see, it isn"t much use as-is. However, it provides the minimal Arduino clone circuit for our "Arduino + Shield = Single PCB" equation, so let"s save it as Fritzingduino_No_Shield.fzz so that we can reuse it in the "+ Shield" designs.

Battlestar Galactica fans will like our new acronym: FrAC. You"ll want to open the Fritzingduino_No_Shield.fzz file and then save it as FrAC.fzz. Next, open the AlarmClock.fzz file shown in Figure 12.

Congratulations! You have learned how to use Fritzing with the Arduino to do designs from the prototype stage to production. You can now take that itchy idea that makes you want to scratch your brain and build it on an Arduino proto shield breadboard for preliminary testing. You can then port that design to an Arduino proto shield PCB for a more robust platform. If you want to make more than one, you can then design a PCB that incorporates your idea with the minimum parts for an Arduino compliant clone — all on a single PCB that you can get made through any of the many PCB houses.

The SparkFun TFT LCD Breakout is a versatile, colorful, and easy way to experiment with graphics or create a user interface for your project. With a 4-wire SPI interface and microSD card holder, you can use this breakout to easily add visual display/interface capabilities to a project as well as providing all the storage you might need for multimedia files.

Out of the box, the SparkFun TFT LCD Breakout will come with a large backing PCB that makes it easy to securely mount the display in a project. If you need a more flexible solution you can remove the display module, snap off half the backing board, and then re-insert the display module. When this is done you"ll be left with the bare minimum frame around the display to more seamlessly integrate with your project.

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a color capactive touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (2.8" diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful! 240x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display. As a bonus, this display has a capacitive single-touch touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. (We also have a resistive touchscreen version of this display breakout)

The 1.44" display has 128x128 color pixels. Unlike the low cost "Nokia 6110" and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 16-bit color using our library code.

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. We also had a little space so we placed a microSD card holder so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card. The microSD card is not included, but you can pick one up here.

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a color touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (2.8" diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful! 240x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.