3.5 inch tft lcd with an arduino nano quotation

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).

The Adafruit library helps reduce the amount of work one needs to do while developing the code for this display, leaving the quality of the user interface to the limitations of the creativity and imagination of the person writing the code.

That’s it for this tutorial guys, thanks for reading. If you made some cool projects based on this or you just want to ask questions about this tutorial, feel free to reach out via the comment section below.

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Hello! I am currently trying to interface the LCD shield from the UNO to the Nano Every. It currently is a white screen and reads an ID of 0x0 when using the "tft.readID()" command. I am writing this post since my other post got removed as spam.

//Since we only want our port pins we can have the following: PB0[D9], PB1[D10], PA1[D7], PF4[D6], PB2[D5], PC6[D4], PF5[D3], PA0[D2]... [] is on board digital pin

I was wondering about the Arduino Zero Pro and the hard-SPI ILI9341 TFT (320x240) shield. I hope this is a proper thread to share my findings and ask a question.

I am using Adafruit_GFX library version 1.10.4, Adafruit Zero DMA library version 1.0.8, board "Arduino M0 Pro", and have cut the traces on the Adafruit "2.8 TFT LCD shield w/Touchscreen and microSD card v2.0" (quoting the silkscreen; there"s no part #). It"s using the SPI on the ICSP port.

I wrote a lot of code using drawBitmap() to move a GFXCanvas to the screen. Performance was discouraging. I put a scope on the SPI clock and the TFT CS wire and saw the SPI clock moving at 24MHz, but discouraging lags between individual bytes. Each byte moved in 310ns, but the time per byte was over five times that. (See attachment)

I would have expected a memory-to-perhiperal DMA from a bitmap in memory to be moving many bytes edge-to-edge, at least the SPI FIFO size (16 bytes on SAMD21 SERCOM) for a wide-enough GFXCanvas.

I removed the #define of USE_SPI_DMA and saw no added slowdowns. I write a loop to do a fillScreen() 100 times and take the average, and that confirms no difference: 251.14 milliseconds per fill with or without the #define.

Should I see any difference, or is my experiment flawed? Is my subclass intializer causing this? Should a drawBitmap() of a canvas as wide as the TFT and 16 scan line high create a burst of DMA-speed SPI traffic? Am I using the wrong #define (is it a good test case)?

First of all, at the beginning of the source code, the author put this conditional SPI initialization that I think supports specific boards other than Arduino boards.

so this check starts with checking if it"s using arduino SPI library, if it"s another SPI library not the one in arduino core libraries folder, then this check is passed.

but also I don"t understand this author, why he/she would put SPI initialization/speed configuration at the beginning of the source file and in the void "ILI9488::begin(void)" function ?

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).

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.

As the code is a bit longer and for better understanding I will post the source code of the program in sections with description for each section. And at the end of this article I will post the complete source 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.

Next is the distance sensor button. First we need to set the color and then using the fillRoundRect() function we will draw the rounded rectangle. Then we will set the color back to white and using the drawRoundRect() function we will draw another rounded rectangle on top of the previous one, but this one will be without a fill so the overall appearance of the button looks like it has a frame. On top of the button we will print the text using the big font and the same background color as the fill of the button. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

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.

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.

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

Display looks nice, installs neatly on top of Mega board, but blocks the rest of the pins. With right-angle pins, you should be able to get around that if necessary, or use cables to connect it instead.

The Due is an open source precise microcontroller board based on the Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU. It is the newcomer and 1st board based on a 32-bit ARM core microcontroller. It adds new features and improve all the standard functionalities.

It offer 54 digital input/output pins (of which 12 can be used as PWM outputs, with selectable resolution), 12 analog inputs with 12 bit of resolution, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), and two DAC outputs (digital to analog converter), 84 MHz crystal oscillator, two USB connections, a power jack, an ICSP header, a JTAG header, and a reset button. The maximum voltage that the I/O pins can provide or tolerate is 3.3V. Providing higher voltages, like 5V to an input pin could damage the board.

The Due has two usb connectors, the one with the micro-usb AB connector is the native one capable to act as an USB host, that means you can connect compatible external usb peripherals to the board, such as mouse, keyboards, smartphones. While the other USB port with the type B connector is intended for debugging purposes.

The SAM3X has 512KB (2 blocks of 256KB) of flash memory for storing code. The bootloader is preburned in factory from Atmel and is stored in a dedicated ROM memory. The available SRAM is 96KB in two contiguous bank of 64KB and 32KB. All the available memory (Flash, RAM and ROM) can be accessed directly as a flat addressing space.

It is possible to erase the Flash memory of the SAM3X with the onboard erase button. This will remove the currently loaded sketch from the MCU. To erase, press and hold the Erase button for a few seconds while the board is powered.

The 3.5 inch TFT LCD Touch Display Shield for Arduino Uno is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. Add the touch display without wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up a library – you’ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino ATMEGA328 Board. RoboticsBD

So spice up your Arduino UNO project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with a built-in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (3.5″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlights) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)!

The Display comes with 480×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display.  As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. RoboticsBD

Crystalfontz has a wide variety of LCD display products. Including ePaper, OLED, TFT and accessories. Watch our LCD videos below to see our display solutions in action.

If there is a Crystalfontz module that you would like to see a video demonstration of, please send a request to our support team, and we will do our best to create one for you.

Not sure how the difference between transflective and transmissive affects sunlight readability? Here is a video that takes you from pitch black to full sunlight, showing how the transflective CFAF480640A-035T compares to a transmissive TFT display module.

In this video, we"re demonstrating driving a 800x480 5" TFT with an Seeeduino (Arduino UNO Clone with 3.3v / 5v switch) and the help of our CFA10100 EVE accelerated board.

Awesome little transparent OLED display. Its a 128x56 pixels and 1.51 inch diagonal. Super-bright, monochrome (light blue). We powered it up with a Seeeduino for this demonstration.

This is a quick video showing our new 1.3 inch TFT LCD. This is a small, full-color TFT. It"s controlled via 4-wire SPI. It has a ST7789H2 controller. This display runs off a single 3.3v supply which controls the logic and backlight.

Ever wonder what will happen if you submerge an OLED display in water? Well we tried it, we also tried coating the components with various sealants to see if we can help protect them in high humidity, or high-water level scenarios.

This is a 2.4" IPS TFT designed for embedded systems. This wide viewing angle IPS display can be used in any orientation--landscape or portrait. The backlight is 850 nits (cd/m2) so it can be used in most lighting conditions.

This is a Capacitive Touch 2.4" IPS TFT designed for embedded systems. This wide viewing angle IPS display can be used in any orientation--landscape or portrait. The backlight is 730 nits (cd/m2) so it can be used in most lighting conditions.

Check out this small, low power transflective LCD display. Available in many options including with and without a backlight, breakout board, or a complete development kit.

For the last day, I"ve been trying to get the library to work with an Arduino Nano RP2040 + IL9341 SPI (https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07QJW73M3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ).

I don"t rule the fact I might be getting something wrong, but can anyone confirm they got TFT_eSPI working on an actual Arduino RP2040 (NOT the Raspberry Pico) ?

Next thing I"ll try is the Adafruit_ILI9341 library, since there are actual videos of people using that combination (AdaFruit_ILI9341 + Arduino RP2040 + SPI screen).