arduino tft display animation code price

I decided I wanted to make a version 2 proton pack. But I also wanted it to have a small screen displaying basic animations. I tried loads of different TFT screens, and all of them were FAR to slow to make an animation.

Well thanks to the ILI9341 and the accompanying library by Marek Buriak, I was finally able to get raw 565 images to load at just over 4fps. Which was sufficient for very basic animations.

The prototype was built by plugging the ESP32 and displays into breadboards and using jumper wires. This is convenient for initial experimentation but is prone to poor connection especially if moved about. It the eyes are to be used as part of a costume then soldering all connections is recommended.

Normally the TFT chip select line for a single display is defined within a user_setup file of the TFT_eSPI library, however when using the library with two displays the chip selects must be controlled by the sketch, thus you must NOT define the TFT_CS pin in the TFT_eSPI library setup files. Instead, the chip selects (CS) must be defined in the "config.h" tab of the Animated_Eyes_2 sketch.

The TFT_eSPI library uses "user_setup" files to define all the parameters for the display, processor and interfaces, for the Animated_Eyes_2 sketch the "Setup47_ST7735.h" file was used with the wiring as shown above.

The displays used for testing were 128x128 ST7735 displays, the TFT_eSPI library setup file may need to be changed as these displays come in many configuration variants.

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.

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to connect the shield to the Arduino and program it using visualino to make the bitmap move on the display.

As shown in picturesTo to start programming the Arduino, insert the TFT shield into the top of the Arduino Uno, you need to install the Arduino IDE from here: Make sure to install 1. 6.

Arduino Uno: Bitmap Animation on ILI9341 TFT Touchscreen Display Shield With Visuino: ILI9341 based TFT Touchscreen Display Shields are very popular low cost Display Shields for…

Displaying a custom image or graphic on a LCD display is a very useful task as displays are now a premium way of providing feedback to users on any project. With this functionality, we can build projects that display our own logo, or display images that help users better understand a particular task the project is performing, providing an all-round improved User Experience (UX) for your Arduino or ESP8266 based project. Today’s tutorial will focus on how you can display graphics on most Arduino compatible displays.

The procedure described in this tutorial works with all color displays supported by Adafruit’s GFX library and also works for displays supported by the TFTLCD library from Adafruit with little modification. Some of the displays on which this procedure works include:

While these are the displays we have, and on which this tutorial was tested, we are confident it will work perfectly fine with most of the other Arduino compatible displays.

For each of the displays mentioned above, we have covered in past how to program and connect them to Arduino. You should check those tutorials, as they will give you the necessary background knowledge on how each of these displays works.

For this tutorial, we will use the 2.8″ ILI9325 TFT Display which offers a resolution of 320 x 340 pixels and we will display a bitmap image of a car.

As usual, each of the components listed above can be bought from the links attached to them. While having all of the displays listed above may be useful, you can use just one of them for this tutorial.

To demonstrate how things work, we will use the 2.8″ TFT Display. The 2.8″ TFT display comes as a shield which plugs directly into the Arduino UNO as shown in the image below.

Not all Arduino displays are available as shields, so when working with any of them, connect the display as you would when displaying text (we recommend following the detailed tutorial for the display type you use of the above list). This means no special connection is required to display graphics.

Before an image is displayed on any of the Arduino screens, it needs to be converted to a C compatible hex file and that can only happen when the image is in bitmap form. Thus, our first task is to create a bitmap version of the graphics to be displayed or convert the existing image to a bitmap file. There are several tools that can be used for creation/conversion of bitmap images including, Corel Draw and Paint.net, but for this tutorial, we will use the Paint.net.

The resolution of the graphics created should be smaller than the resolution of your display to ensure the graphics fit properly on the display. For this example, the resolution of the display is 320 x 340, thus the resolution of the graphics was set to195 x 146 pixels.

Your graphics could also include some text. Just ensure the background is black and the fill color is white if you plan to change the color within your Arduino code.

With the graphics done, save both files as .bmp with 24bits color.It is important to keep in mind that large bitmaps use up a lot of memory and may prevent your code from running properly so always keep the bitmaps as small as possible.

Image2Code is an easy-to-use, small Java utility to convert images into a byte array that can be used as a bitmap on displays that are compatible with the Adafruit-GFX or Adafruit TFTLCD (with little modification) library.

Paste the bit array in the graphics.c file and save. Since we have two graphics (the car and the text), You can paste their data array in the same file. check the graphics.c file attached to the zip file, under the download section to understand how to do this. Don’t forget to declare the data type as “const unsigned char“, add PROGEM in front of it and include the avr/pgmspace.h header file as shown in the image below.  This instructs the code to store the graphics data in the program memory of the Arduino.

With this done, we are now ready to write the code. Do note that this procedure is the same for all kind of displays and all kind of graphics. Convert the graphics to a bitmap file and use the Img2code utility to convert it into a hex file which can then be used in your Arduino code.

To reduce the amount of code, and stress involved in displaying the graphics, we will use two wonderful libraries; The GFX library and the TFTLCD library from Adafruit.

The GFX library, among several other useful functions, has a function called drawBitmap(), which enables the display of a monochrome bitmap image on the display. This function allows the upload of monochrome only (single color) graphics, but this can be overcome by changing the color of the bitmap using some code.

The Adafruit libraries do not support all of the displays but there are several modifications of the libraries on the internet for more displays. If you are unable to find a modified version of the library suitable for your the display, all you need do is copy the code of the drawBitmap() function from the GFX library and paste it in the Arduino sketch for your project such that it becomes a user-defined function.

The first two are thex and y coordinates of a point on the screen where we want the image to be displayed. The next argument is the array in which the bitmap is loaded in our code, in this case, it will be the name of the car and the text array located in the graphics.c file. The next two arguments are the width and height of the bitmap in pixels, in other words, the resolution of the image. The last argument is the color of the bitmap, we can use any color we like. The bitmap data must be located in program memory since Arduino has a limited amount of RAM memory available.

As usual, we start writing the sketch by including the libraries required. For this procedure, we will use the TFTLCD library alone, since we are assuming you are using a display that is not supported by the GFX library.

Next, we specify the name of the graphics to be displayed; car and title. At this stage, you should have added the bit array for these two bitmaps in the graphics.c file and the file should be placed in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

With that done, we proceed to the void loop function, under the loop function, we call the drawbitmap() function to display the car and the text bitmap using different colors.

The last section of the code is the drawBitmap function itself, as earlier mentioned, to use the drawbitmap() function with the Adafruit TFTLCD library, we need to copy the function’s code and paste into the Arduino sketch.

Plug in your screen as shown above. If you are using any other display, connect it as shown in the corresponding linked tutorial. With the schematics in place, connect the Arduino board to your PC and upload the code. Don’t forget the graphics file needs to be in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

That’s it for this tutorial guys. The procedure is the same for all kinds of Arduino compatible displays. If you get stuck while trying to replicate this using any other display, feel free to reach out to me via the comment sections below.

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 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.

The first thing, as usual, is to include the libraries to be used after which we declare the pins on the Arduino to which our LCD pins are connected to. We also make a slight change to the code setting reset pin as pin 8 and DC pin as pin 9 to match our schematics.

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.

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.

The uLCD-144G2 display module is compact and cost effective and features a 1.44” LCD TFT screen, which is the smallest LCD TFT module available from 4D Systems. Driven by the GOLDELOX processor, the uLCD-144G2 is the perfect compact display solution for any application requiring a small embedded screen.

The module is an elegant combination of a 1.44” TFT LCD screen, along with a modest but comprehensive collection of I/O Features. These include a micro-SD card connector, two general purpose input/output pins (GPIO"s) with Dallas 1-Wire Support, Analog Input and sound generation capability, along with serial communications.

This display module serves as a perfect solution to be deployed at the forefront of any product design, requiring a brilliance of colour, animation or images on any application. This GOLDELOX driven Intelligent Display Module is a perfect example of where art meets technology.

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to connect the shield to the Arduino and program it using visualino to make the bitmap move on the display.

As shown in picturesTo to start programming the Arduino, insert the TFT shield into the top of the Arduino Uno, you need to install the Arduino IDE from here: Make sure to install 1. 6.

Arduino Uno: Bitmap Animation on ILI9341 TFT Touchscreen Display Shield With Visuino: ILI9341 based TFT Touchscreen Display Shields are very popular low cost Display Shields for…

Whatever you are currently celebrating, Christmas, Hanukkah, Jul, Samhain, Festivus, or any other end-of-the-civil-year festivities, I wish you a good time! This December 25th edition of the Nextion Sunday Blog won"t be loaded with complex mathematical theory or hyper-efficient but difficult to understand code snippets. It"s about news and information. Please read below...After two theory-loaded blog posts about handling data array-like in strings (Strings, arrays, and the less known sp(lit)str(ing) function and Strings & arrays - continued) which you are highly recommended to read before continuing here, if you haven"t already, it"s big time to see how things work in practice! We"ll use a string variable as a lookup lookup table containing data of one single wave period and add this repeatedly to a waveform component until it"s full.A few weeks ago, I wrote this article about using a text variable as an array, either an array of strings or an array of numbers, using the covx conversion function in addition for the latter, to extract single elements with the help of the spstr function. It"s a convenient and almost a "one fits all" solution for most use cases and many of the demo projects or the sample code attached to the Nextion Sunday Blog articles made use of it, sometimes even without mentioning it explicitly since it"s almost self-explaining. Then, I got a message from a reader, writing: "... Why then didn"t you use it for the combined sine / cosine lookup table in the flicker free turbo gauge project?"105 editions of the Nextion Sunday blog in a little over two years - time to look back and forth at the same time. Was all the stuff I wrote about interesting for my readers? Is it possible at all to satisfy everybody - hobbyists, makers, and professionals - at the same time? Are people (re-)using the many many HMI demo projects and code snippets? Is anybody interested in the explanation of all the underlying basics like the algorithms for calculating square roots and trigonometric functions with Nextion"s purely integer based language? Are optimized code snippets which allow to save a few milliseconds here and there helpful to other developers?Looking through the different Nextion user groups on social networks, the Nextion user forum and a few not so official but Nextion related forums can be surprising. Sometimes, Nextion newbies ask questions or have issues although the required function is well (in a condensed manner for the experienced developer, I admit) documented on the Nextion Instruction Set page, accessible through the menu of this website. On top of that, there is for sure one of my more than 100 Sunday blog articles which deals not only with that function, but goes often even beyond the usual usage of it. Apparently, I should sometimes move away from always trying to push the limits and listen to the "back to the roots!" calls by my potential readers...Do you remember the (almost) full screen sized flicker free and ultra rapid gauge we designed in June? And this without using the built-in Gauge component? If not, it"s time to read this article first, to understand today"s improvements. The June 2022 version does its job perfectly, the needle movement is quick and smooth, and other components can be added close to the outer circle without flickering since there is no background which needs constantly to be redrawn. But there was a minor and only esthetic weak point: The needle was a 1px thin line, sometimes difficult to see. Thus, already a short time after publishing, some readers contacted me and asked if there were a way to make the needle thicker, at least 2 pixels.

I optimize other people"s code for a living. This library is a good example of the kind of work I do for my commercial clients; it contains many unique and clever optimizations that allows it to perform better than anything else available. I"m happy to contribute optimized libraries to the open source community in addition to working on commercial projects. Whatever platform you"re using, I can make significant improvements to your native code. Please contact me so that I can show you how.

I started working with image and video files around 1989 and soon turned my interest into a Document Imaging product based on my own imaging library. Over the years I added support for more and more formats until I had supported all of the standard ones, including DICOM. I sold my Document Imaging business in 1997, but still found uses for my imaging code in other projects such as retro gaming. I recently went looking to see if there was a good GIF player for Arduino and only found Adafruit"s library. Unfortunately it only runs on their ATSAMD51 boards. I thought it would be possible to use my old code to create a universal GIF player that could run on any MCU/SoC with at least 24K of RAM, so I started modifying my old GIF code for this purpose. The focus of this project is speed and to use as little RAM as possible, so there are some limitations.

To save memory, the code limits the maximum image width to 320 pixels. This is just a constant defined in AnimatedGIF.h, so you can set it larger if you like. Animated GIF images have a lot of options to save space when encoding the changes from frame to frame. Many of the tools which generate animated GIFs don"t make use of every option and that"s helpful because the frame disposal options are not supported in the library code. They can be implemented in your drawing callback if you want. The reason they"re not provided with this code is because one of the image disposal options requires you to keep an entire copy of the previous frame and this would prevent it from working on low memory MCUs. If would also require dynamic memory allocation which is another area I avoided with this code.

My work is always focused on code optimization, so this project is no different. I"ve profiled this code and optimized it for 32-bit CPUs. I discovered while testing it that seeking on micro SD cards (on Arduino) is very very slow. I had to use a little extra RAM to buffer incoming data to avoid seeking. The code does need to seek, but it"s done very rarely. I also wrote code to buffer and de-chunk some of the incoming LZW data to avoid checking for chunk boundaries in the inner decode loop. There are a number of clever optimizations that should allow this to run faster than any existing GIF solutions on Arduino boards. The speed gained from my decoder will be lost if it takes too long to display the pixels. For this reason, the GIFDRAW callback passes an RGB565 palette in the byte order of your choosing and the example sketches uses functions to write entire lines of pixels to the SPI TFT displays in a single shot. If you implement your own GIFDRAW callback and have to pass 1 pixel at a time to whatever display device you"re using, this will cause a major slowdown in the display of the frames.

The chart above shows the total time to decode an 8-frame sequence included in the test_images folder. The decoding speed of your particular image depends on the complexity (how much compressed data) and if/how transparent pixels are used. Small runs of transparent pixels will interfere with the performance of displaying the image on an SPI LCD. This particular image doesn"t use transparency, so the time is purely for decoding the data.

You"ll notice that the images provided in the test_images folder have been turned into C code. Each byte is now in the form 0xAB so that it can be compiled into your program and stored in FLASH memory alongside your other code. You can use a command I wrote called image_to_c (https://github.com/bitbank2/image_to_c) to convert a binary file into this type of text. If you use another tool, make sure to add a const modifier in front of the GIF data array to ensure that it gets written to FLASH and not RAM by your build environment.

One of the reasons that this is apparently the first universal GIF library for Arduino is because the lack of available RAM and myriad display options would make it difficult to support all MCUs and displays properly. I decided that to solve this issue, I would isolate the GIF decoding from the display and file I/O with callback functions. This allows the core code to run on any system, but you need to help it a little. At a minimum, your code must provide a function to draw (or store) each scan line of image. If you"re playing a GIF file from memory, this is the only function you need to provide. In the examples folder there are multiple sketches to show how this is done on various display libraries. For reading from SD cards, 4 other functions must be provided: open, close, read, seek. There is an example for implementing these in the examples folder as well.

If you"re using the ESP32 or ESP8266 and playing GIF images stored in RAM, you"ll need to provide the 4 file callback functions or modify the existing ones because RAM and FLASH are in different address spaces (Harvard architecture). The code assumes the source of the GIF data is in FLASH and uses memcpy_P() instead of memcpy() to access it.