160 x 128 tft display adafruit quotation

This Bare Basic deals with connecting an Arduino with a breakout, serial SPI interfaced, 160×128 pixel color TFT display with a screen diagonal of 1.8 inch. The controller chip is a ST7735S.

The Sitronics ST7735 is a versatile display controller chip used to drive affordable, Arduino compatible TFT screens with moderate dimensions (1.8 inch display diameter; 160×128 pixels; 16-bit color). Displays with this chip can be applied as output color graphics / text display in an Arduino environment. An interesting library written by Adafruit exits that provides sufficient tools to create colorful, attractive presentation of data.

Once an Arduino has collected and manipulated data, display of the output is obvious. Reporting can be arranged via the Arduino IDE and Serial Monitor, but in this situation the Arduino must be connected to a computer while there is no way to directly produce graphical output. A separate display can be very handy for graphical data display and is especially recommended in standalone applications.

Displays for the Arduino are available in all kinds and price classes. I distinguish three groups: LCD, OLED and TFT. Well known is the monochrome LCD display with a blue or green background, usually with two lines of 16 characters or 4 lines of 20 characters, with each ‘character’ created in its own 8×5 pixel matrix. These LCD displays are good for displaying short messages or numerical values while they lack graphical capabilities and colors. Special LCD displays are the 128×64 monochrome numerical/graphical LCD display whose library offers a few primitive graphics, and the Nokia 5110 84×48 LCD display with a PCD8544 controller. LCD displays do not offer colors other than background versus character.

Figure 1: 1.8 inch 160×128 color TFT display with SPI interface on a breakout board (ST7735 compatible). Left: simple sketch showing text mode; right: graphics test mode.

A special kind of LCD is the OLED display. This family includes small, programmable graphical displays (64×32 or 128×32 pixels) in monochrome or full color.

More versatile than the LCD displays, as well as larger, are TFT displays (fig 1). These are capable of graphics and a spectrum of colors (65,536 up to 256,000 colors) to the degree that they support realistic display of color pictures. TFT displays can be bought in a dazzling array of sizes, resolution, interfaces and prices.

TFT displays for the Arduino microcontroller boards can be accessed via an 8-bit parallel data interface – fast but consuming at least 8 pins of the Arduino. An alternative is the serial SPI interface which needs only five pins.

Figure 2: Wiring of the 160×128 SPI 1.8 inch color TFT display. Note that more expensive displays have a voltage level shifter on board. This makes it possible to connect VCC with 5V instead of 3.3V as in this clone situation.

Here is a no-frills sketch that does what is needed; display some message on the display, with some color and two graphic element (one visible: the frame rectangles and one invisible: the rectangles filled with the same color as the background used to wipe out text).

ST7735 controller based TFT displays are very handy displays for use in Arduino applications. One typical application is a standalone weather station built around an Arduino platform and decorated with temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors. The ST7735 is less sophisticated as the bigger parallel TFT screens but displays based on this chip form a nice intermediate between the ‘big’ TFTs and the basic LCD displays.

Hi guys, welcome to today’s tutorial. Today, we will look on how to use the 1.8″ ST7735  colored TFT display with Arduino. The past few tutorials have been focused on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display extensively but there will be a time when we will need to use a colored display or something bigger with additional features, that’s where the 1.8″ ST7735 TFT display comes in.

The ST7735 TFT display is a 1.8″ display with a resolution of 128×160 pixels and can display a wide range of colors ( full 18-bit color, 262,144 shades!). The display uses the SPI protocol for communication and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer which means it can be used with all kinds of microcontroller and you only need 4 i/o pins. To complement the display, it also comes with an SD card slot on which colored bitmaps can be loaded and easily displayed on the screen.

The schematics for this project is fairly easy as the only thing we will be connecting to the Arduino is the display. Connect the display to the Arduino as shown in the schematics below.

Due to variation in display pin out from different manufacturers and for clarity, the pin connection between the Arduino and the TFT display is mapped out below:

We will use two libraries from Adafruit to help us easily communicate with the LCD. The libraries include the Adafruit GFX library which can be downloaded here and the Adafruit ST7735 Library which can be downloaded here.

We will use two example sketches to demonstrate the use of the ST7735 TFT display. The first example is the lightweight TFT Display text example sketch from the Adafruit TFT examples. It can be accessed by going to examples -> TFT -> Arduino -> TFTDisplaytext. This example displays the analog value of pin A0 on the display. It is one of the easiest examples that can be used to demonstrate the ability of this display.

The second example is the graphics test example from the more capable and heavier Adafruit ST7735 Arduino library. I will explain this particular example as it features the use of the display for diverse purposes including the display of text and “animated” graphics. With the Adafruit ST7735 library installed, this example can be accessed by going to examples -> Adafruit ST7735 library -> graphics test.

Next, we create an object of the library with the pins to which the LCD is connected on the Arduino as parameters. There are two options for this, feel free to choose the most preferred.

Next, we move to the void setup function where we initialize the screen and call different test functions to display certain texts or images.  These functions can be edited to display what you want based on your project needs.

testdrawtext("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur adipiscing ante sed nibh tincidunt feugiat. Maecenas enim massa, fringilla sed malesuada et, malesuada sit amet turpis. Sed porttitor neque ut ante pretium vitae malesuada nunc bibendum. Nullam aliquet ultrices massa eu hendrerit. Ut sed nisi lorem. In vestibulum purus a tortor imperdiet posuere. ", ST7735_WHITE);

All the functions called under the void setup function, perform different functions, some draw lines, some, boxes and text with different font, color and size and they can all be edited to do what your project needs.

The complete code for this is available under the libraries example on the Arduino IDE. Don’t forget to change the DC and the RESET pin configuration in the code to match the schematics.

Uploading the code to the Arduino board brings a flash of different shapes and text with different colors on the display. I captured one and its shown in the image below.

That’s it for this tutorial guys, what interesting thing are you going to build with this display? Let’s get the conversation started. Feel free to reach me via the comment section if you have any questions as regards this project.

TFT color display with 160 x 80 pixel resolution and 0.96 inch diagonal. The SPI interface is used to communicate with the display. The module also contains a microSD card slot on which to display graphics. Thanks to the built-in 3.3 V voltage stabilizer, the module is compatible with both 3.3 V and 5 V logic. It can be connected to most starter sets with microcontrollers as well as microprocessors. It has a white LED backlight PWM signal control. The module has support in the form of the Adafruit GFX library .

The TFT isn’t ‘plug & play’ with the Raspberry, a patch has to be applied to the kernel to be able to interface via SPI with the ST7735R controller chip on the TFT. Once working, the display will act as a framebuffer device.

As it takes over three hours to compile the kernel on the PI, I will show how to cross compile from another Linux PC. In my case, it is Ubuntu 12.10 running within VMWare on a Windows 7 Quad core PC. Kernel compile time is 15 mins.

-Copy config from the Raspberry Pi to the Ubuntu box using SCP. Replace ‘raspberrypi’ below with the IP address of your Raspberry Pi if hostname lookup fails.

If you are planning on displaying the console on the TFT, then enabling these options in .config will allow you to change the font size and rotate the display later on.

The last step below is to SCP the files from from Ubuntu to the Raspberry Pi. If you have trouble SCPing into your Ubuntu box you may need to install open SSH on Ubuntu with sudo apt-get install openssh-server. This step also copies the files from my home folder ‘mark’… yours would be different.

If you build the st7735 driver pair as built-in, add these options to the end of the line in /boot/cmdline.txt. This will display the console on the TFT.

The 1.8" display has 128x160 color pixels. The TFT driver (ST7735) can display full 18-bit color. The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector)

In the above example, Node32-Lite and this 1.8-inch LCD.  Please refer to the tutorial here: ST7735S interfacing with ESP32 to make the connections, Arduino library installation, and modification needed for it to works on this LCD.

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.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.

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:

Note: some people find issues with this display when trying to read from the SD card. We don’t know why that happens. In fact, we tested a couple of times and it worked well, and then, when we were about to record to show you the final result, the display didn’t recognized the SD card anymore – we’re not sure if it’s a problem with the SD card holder that doesn’t establish a proper connection with the SD card. However, we are sure these instructions work, because we’ve tested them.

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.

The Arduino TFT screen is a backlit TFT LCD screen with a micro SD card slot in the back. You can draw text, images, and shapes to the screen with the TFT library.

The Arduino TFT library extends the Adafruit GFX, and Adafruit ST7735 libraries that it is based on. The GFX library is responsible for the drawing routines, while the ST7735 library is specific to the screen on the Arduino screen. The Arduino specific additions were designed to work as similarly to the Processing API as possible.

The TFT library relies on the SPI library, which must be included in any sketch that uses the scree. If you wish to use the SD card, you need to include the SD library as well.

If you are using an Esplora, the structure of the program is the exact same. As the Esplora has a socket designed for the screen, and the pins for using the screen are fixed, an Esplora only object is created when targeting sketches for that board. You can reference the screen attached to an Esplora throughEsploraTFT.

To give the illusion of motion, you need to quickly erase and draw images on the screen. When using Processing on a powerful computer, you can callbackground() every time through your draw() function to erase the window contests and dra objects in their new positions. The Arduino is not as fast, is it takes a little time to clear the screen when calling background() with the TFT library.

The TFT library includes a basic font for drawing text on screen. By default, characters are 5 pixels wide and 8 pixels tall. It is possible to change the font size to 10x16, 15x24, or 20x32. For additional information on the underlying font capabilities, see the Adafruit page on graphic primitives.

The TFT library has the ability to read .bmp files off a SD card and display them on the screen. Images can be smaller or larger than the screen resolution (160x128), but there is no method on the Arduino for image manipulation. The images should be sized before you put them on the SD card.

In the following example, a bitmap that is 160x128 pixels named "arduino.bmp" is in the root directory of a SD card. When read by the library and drawn, the image will fill the screen.

Connecting the pins in the proper way, you can see the lcd screen working with your Uno (or Duemilanove) just uploading the simple "TFTBitmapLogo" sketch.

The screen will show this message: "Arduino TFT Bitmap Example. Open serial monitor to run the sketch". Open the serial monitor to view the Arduino Logo.

Now that you have tested the basic functionality of the screen, see the TFT library pages for information about the library"s API and additional examples. It"s also recommended to visit the Adafruit graphics library page for additional information on functions not covered.

This is a graphics library for the family of small colour TFT displays based on the ST7735 and ST7789 driver chips. These are really nice displays; bright, colourful, available in a variety of useful sizes, and available at low cost from suppliers like Adafruit, AliExpress, or Banggood:

This library allows you to plot points, draw lines, draw filled rectangles, and plot text with an optional scale factor. I"ve included a demo histogram-plotting program that adjusts itself to fit each of the displays I"ve supported.

Unlike most other TFT display libraries this one doesn"t require a memory buffer, allowing it to be run on any processor down to an ATtiny85. The displays are SPI and require four pins to drive the display, leaving one pin free on an ATtiny85 to interface to another device, such as a temperature sensor. If you need more pins choose a larger chip, such as the ATtiny84; see Using the library with other AVR chips at the end of the article for information about how to convert the code for different chips.

I"ve published a library for a colour OLED display in a previous article: Colour Graphics Library. The main difference between the colour TFT displays and the colour OLED displays is that the TFT displays are not self-illuminating, and so need a backlight; they therefore have a slightly higher power consumption. However, they are exceedingly cheap, and they are available in larger sizes than the colour OLED displays.

This library will work with displays based on the ST7735 which supports a maximum display size of 132 (H) x 162 (V), or the similar ST7789 which supports a maximum display size of 240 (H) x 320 (V).

The display driver interfaces to the displays with the longer side as the vertical dimension, which is why the rectangular displays are usually listed with the longer dimension second. My library allows you to rotate the image for any desired orientation.

All the Adafruit breakout boards for these displays include level-shifting circuitry, so they will work with either 5V or 3.3V microcontroller boards. They also include an SD card socket, if that"s of interest to you. The Adafruit boards have pullups on the backlight and reset pins, so the display will work if you leave these pins unconnected.

The pullup resistor from the display"s CS pin is optional; it holds the chip select high to prevent the display from being affected by the ISP signals while programming the ATtiny85.

The different displays are catered for by six constants which specify the size of the display, the offsets relative to the area supported by the display driver, whether the display is inverted, and the rotation value; for example:

Note that on some displays you may also have to change the xoff or yoff value when rotating the display. For example, to rotate the image on the 240x240 displays by 180° use the settings:

To check or adjust the values for each display I ran this program, which draws a one-pixel border around the display area, and plots an "F" to show the orientation:

The ATtiny85 and other AVR processors supports toggling of one or more bits in a port, so provided you set all the pins to their disabled state at startup, for speed the display access routines can simply toggle the appropriate pins to enable or disable them.

The InitDisplay() routine first defines the four display pins as outputs, and takes the SCK, DC, and CS pins high (inactive). It then sends the essential configuration commands to the display.

The display memory stores 18 bits per pixel: 6 bits per colour. However, you can write to the display in three alternative modes, with 12, 16, or 18 bits per pixel. I chose the 16 bit mode, which assigns 5 bits to red, 6 bits to green, and 5 bits blue. It"s the most convenient one to work with as you simply send two bytes to define the colour of each pixel.

To clear the display the ClearDisplay() routine sends the appropriate number of zero bytes. The routine temporarily switches to 12-bit colour mode, which reduces the time to clear the display by 25%:

The library includes basic graphics routines for plotting points and drawing lines. These work on a conventional coordinate system with the origin at lower left. For example, on the 80x160 display:

My first version of PlotChar() plotted characters by calling PlotPoint() for each pixel. However, I then tried the following alternative approach which defines an area of the display using the CASET (Column Address Set) and RASET (Row Address Set) commands, and then sends a stream of the appropriate bytes to define the character. This turned out to be over three times faster!

14th January 2020: Tested the program with the Adafruit 1.3" 240x240 TFT display, and updated the program to correct a problem when rotating the image on that display.

This is a compact graphics library that supports a range of different colour TFT displays, such as the displays from Adafruit and AliExpress. It uses standard Arduino SPI calls making it compatible with a variety of different boards and processors:

In my earlier article Tiny TFT Graphics Library I described a small graphics library designed for driving a variety of TFT displays from an ATtiny85. This library is an extension of that program, with the following enhancements:

* These Adafruit displays conveniently all have the same edge-connector layout, so you can make a prototyping board or PCB that will take any of them.

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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.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.

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:

Note: some people find issues with this display when trying to read from the SD card. We don’t know why that happens. In fact, we tested a couple of times and it worked well, and then, when we were about to record to show you the final result, the display didn’t recognized the SD card anymore – we’re not sure if it’s a problem with the SD card holder that doesn’t establish a proper connection with the SD card. However, we are sure these instructions work, because we’ve tested them.

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.