orange pi zero tft display made in china

This microcomputer can not boast of high performance. Still, it has a compact size, ultra-low power consumption, and can perform those tasks, for which implementation Arduino or ESP8266 platform will not be enough. The power of the microcomputer of Raspberry Pi 3 level or its more expensive and productive brothers will be excessive.

The origins of the Orange Pi line of microcomputers go back to 2014 when Chinese company Lemaker released its clone of the increasingly popular Raspberry Pi, the Banana Pi M1 single-board computer.

Shortly after that, there was a split among the developers. One part continued to produce specialized and no longer positioned for the home user “development boards” under the Lemaker brand. SinoVoip continued to develop a line of Banana Pi microcomputers, the total number of models in which has already exceeded a dozen. Finally, Shenzhen Xunlong Software, managed by Steven Zhao, created the Orange Pi line, focusing on low prices.

The tactic proved to be a winner – today, Orange Pi is one of the most famous brands among single-boarders, and the number of sales of the Orange Pi Zero model alone in the Shenzhen Xunlong Software store has exceeded 8000 copies since its release in November 2016.

26-pin expansion board: GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output Interface), Power (+5V, +3.3V and GND), some pins can be used as UART, I2C, SPI or PWM 13 pins, 2 x USB, IR, AUDIO(MIC, AV)

Orange Pi Zero has two GPIO combs, one for 13 pins and one for 26 pins. The 13-pin comb is used to connect the Interface Board – an expansion board with additional USB ports, analog AV output, microphone, and IR port. The 26-pin comb is available for user peripherals, and its pinout is shown in the illustration above.

The package does not differ from that of the Raspberry Pi 3. The electronic components are sealed in anti-static bags and packed in separate cardboard boxes with branding. The plastic case is shipped unpackaged in a simple polyethylene bag.

Orange Pi Zero has one USB 2.0 port and a 100 megabit Ethernet interface with PoE (Power over Ethernet) technology, which allows you to power the device directly through the Ethernet cable. This technology is most often used in video surveillance and requires a PoE-enabled network switch.

The largest chip is the Allwinner H2+ SoC, and next to it is a 256MB or 512MB RAM module, depending on the Orange Pi Zero version. And the small square chip is the Allwinner XR819 chip, a cheap and compact Wi-Fi module. Usually, Wi-Fi modules are combined with Bluetooth modules, but the XR819 does not support Bluetooth. You have to keep it in mind and if you are going to use Bluetooth-connected peripherals, make sure you buy a USB adapter beforehand.

The GPIO interface is represented by two combs: a 13 pin one for the expansion card connection and a 26 pin one for everything else. The 26 pin comb is not unsoldered by default: the person who wants to use the GPIO periphery is supposed to solder the connectors himself and decide whether they will be directed upwards or beveled corner ones.

Since there is no HDMI interface (as far as I understand, it is not supported by the Allwinner H2+ chip), the only way to connect Orange Pi Zero to the screen is to buy an adapter cable from AV plug to analog “tunnels”. Or connect a small TFT display to the GPIO.

Nothing is interesting on the backside of the expansion board, just another sticker with a barcode. The numbers on it indicate that the expansion card was produced before the Orange Pi Zero itself. In general, it makes sense – not every buyer of microcomputers gets additional accessories.

Orange Pi Zero is rather undemanding to the power supply – the microcomputer consumes about 300 mA, which means that its working power supply of 1 A will be enough. Of course, you should take into account the consumption of connected peripherals – if you connect several hard drives, then 1A is not enough for everything.

As for the heating and cooling, in this case, everything is not clear. Allwinner H2+ is noticeably warm. The chips made by Allwinner Technology, in general, do not belong to the number of colds. But there is a software bug in the Armbian operating system (more about it later), which causes incorrect display of SoC temperature on Orange Pi Zero revision 1.4 – and this is the latest revision at the moment, and it is on sale. This bug, by the way, is honestly reported on the distribution download page.

At zero CPU load, Armbian shows a temperature around 140°F. It is logical to suppose that if you load the processor, then at such starting conditions, the temperature will instantly fly beyond 176°F, and hard trolling will start. But this does not happen. The temperature rises, but only slightly, no trolling starts, no smoke comes out of the chip :).

Until this bug is fixed programmatically in Armbian, it is impossible to track the SoC’s real temperature. It is not superfluous to install radiators – here, the copper ones which I used for cooling Raspberry Pi 3 will do.

Before using the microcomputer, let’s assemble it in one piece. The correct way to start is to glue the heatsinks to the SoC and memory module, but I didn’t think to buy them beforehand, so I assembled without them.

After that, we put the Orange Pi Zero board with GPIO pins on the Interface board socket. By the way, there is no access to the 26 pin GPIO interface of the Orange Pi Zero board from the case as well as there is no place for the complete Wi-Fi antenna. Therefore the antenna must be disconnected before assembling the board, and if you plan to work with GPIO – you should not assemble the microcomputer in the case at all.

And a couple of words about how to take the whole construction back apart. The Orange Pi Zero board sits pretty tightly on the Interface board socket, and you can’t get it out with bare hands. You need to put some thin and hard object under the board and use it as a lever.

Orange Pi developers offer you to download several Linux distributions, of which there are even variants like OpenWrt and Zeroshell for routers and other network equipment.

On the page with the distribution, known problems are listed: the lack of drivers for the Mali-400MP2 graphics gas pedal, lack of support for hardware video decoding, bug with the display of wrong CPU temperature, poor support for built-in Wi-Fi module, and the work of analog video output “at your own risk”.

So, if you are not confused by the well-known problems of the Armbian distribution kit for Orange Pi Zero – don’t hesitate to download and install it, especially because there are no better alternatives at the moment.

The memory card with the recorded system has to be installed into Orange Pi Zero, then connect the microcomputer to the local network with an Ethernet cable and apply power.

After that, you can monitor temperature (incorrectly displayed, but still), CPU load, uptime, and other indicators at http://ip-address-orange-pi:8888, accessible from any device within the local network.

Despite what was said in the notes to the Armbian release about poor support of the Wi-Fi module and the fact that when assembling the microcomputer in its case, I had to disconnect the external antenna, the Wi-Fi connection quality can be assessed as quite satisfactory.

A microcomputer can be turned into a handy network audio player. You can find details of such a project on the Internet by searching for “Logitech Media Server” or “Squeezelite”. I may write a separate post on this topic in the future.

Because of its low price Orange Pi Zero is perfect for a print server implementation based on the CUPS package. In this case, the price of the device is half of what you would pay for an off-the-shelf print server in a store.

By connecting a webcam via USB, you can turn Orange Pi Zero into an IP-camera for video surveillance, and the PoE support adds to the convenience: if you have a PoE-compatible switch, you will need to pull only one Ethernet-cable to the makeshift camera for power and data transmission. The feasibility of building such a device from scratch is questionable because the cost of the factory IP-camera in China is roughly equal to the cost of a set of Orange Pi Zero and a webcam. But if there’s a webcam at home that’s already gathering dust, this is a good opportunity to give it a second life.

You can make the device a smart home server by installing the Domoticz / Home Assistant / OpenHAB / MajorDoMo platform on Orange Pi Zero. There will be a separate post about it in the future.

These are the simplest and most obvious options. It is possible to think up more highly specialized ways of using it – for example, I’ve seen on the web someone had put together a system based on Orange Pi Zero to control the automatics of aquariums.

Orange Pi Zero isn’t a high-end performance contender and can hardly be used for resource-intensive multimedia tasks, but it is very handy for building inexpensive and utilitarian devices aimed at one particular function – like the above-mentioned print-server, hiking NAS, or smart home system control head-device.

The low cost makes it a good option for beginners, although in my personal opinion, the Raspberry Pi 3 is still the best option because of the more mature community and the improved operating system.

And here is part for touchscreen. We are going to use emulated spi bus with bitbang. At this point bitbang isn"t compiled in armbian kernel - we will take care of this later.

... and recompile kernel, then install deb packages from output directory. You may also copy drivers, it may be faster for testing but it"s not advised for "serious" deployment.

The RPi LCD can be driven in two ways: Method 1. install driver to your Raspbian OS. Method 2. use the Ready-to-use image file of which LCD driver was pre-installed.

2) Connect the TF card to the PC, open the Win32DiskImager software, select the system image downloaded in step 1 and click‘Write’ to write the system image. ( How to write an image to a micro SD card for your Pi? See RPi Image Installation Guides for more details)

3) Connect the TF card to the Raspberry Pi, start the Raspberry Pi. The LCD will display after booting up, and then log in to the Raspberry Pi terminal,(You may need to connect a keyboard and HDMI LCD to Pi for driver installing, or log in remotely with SSH)

This LCD can be calibrated through the xinput-calibrator program. Note: The Raspberry Pi must be connected to the network, or else the program won"t be successfully installed.

In this article, you will learn how to use TFT LCDs by Arduino boards. From basic commands to professional designs and technics are all explained here.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

Size of displays affects your project parameters. Bigger Display is not always better. if you want to display high-resolution images and signs, you should choose a big size display with higher resolution. But it decreases the speed of your processing, needs more space and also needs more current to run.

After choosing the right display, It’s time to choose the right controller. If you want to display characters, tests, numbers and static images and the speed of display is not important, the Atmega328 Arduino boards (such as Arduino UNO) are a proper choice. If the size of your code is big, The UNO board may not be enough. You can use Arduino Mega2560 instead. And if you want to show high resolution images and motions with high speed, you should use the ARM core Arduino boards such as Arduino DUE.

In electronics/computer hardware a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a microprocessor, microcontroller, ASIC or general-purpose peripheral interface and a particular type of display device, e.g. LCD, LED, OLED, ePaper, CRT, Vacuum fluorescent or Nixie.

The display driver will typically accept commands and data using an industry-standard general-purpose serial or parallel interface, such as TTL, CMOS, RS232, SPI, I2C, etc. and generate signals with suitable voltage, current, timing and demultiplexing to make the display show the desired text or image.

The LCDs manufacturers use different drivers in their products. Some of them are more popular and some of them are very unknown. To run your display easily, you should use Arduino LCDs libraries and add them to your code. Otherwise running the display may be very difficult. There are many free libraries you can find on the internet but the important point about the libraries is their compatibility with the LCD’s driver. The driver of your LCD must be known by your library. In this article, we use the Adafruit GFX library and MCUFRIEND KBV library and example codes. You can download them from the following links.

By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println(); . First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().

Upload your image and download the converted file that the UTFT libraries can process. Now copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are size of the image.

In this template, We just used a string and 8 filled circles that change their colors in order. To draw circles around a static point ,You can use sin();  and cos(); functions. you should define the PI number . To change colors, you can use color565(); function and replace your RGB code.

In this template, We converted a .jpg image to .c file and added to the code, wrote a string and used the fade code to display. Then we used scroll code to move the screen left. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We used sin(); and cos(); functions to draw Arcs with our desired thickness and displayed number by text printing function. Then we converted an image to hex code and added them to the code and displayed the image by bitmap function. Then we used draw lines function to change the style of the image. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We created a function which accepts numbers as input and displays them as a pie chart. We just use draw arc and filled circle functions.

while (a < b) { Serial.println(a); j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 255, 255)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

while (b < a) { j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 0, 0)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

In this template, We display simple images one after each other very fast by bitmap function. So you can make your animation by this trick.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We just display some images by RGBbitmap and bitmap functions. Just make a code for touchscreen and use this template.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

Orange Pi 2G-IoT is a low cost ARM Linux board with 2G, and WiFi & Bluetooth connectivity, basically with the guts of a smartphone minus the display and battery. Shenzhen Xunlong has now released a 800×480 display with capacitive touch support for the board available in black or white, and selling for $9.98 plus shipping.

Software support is a mystery, and while I’m pretty sure it will work in Android, I don’t know if Linux distributions will support the display, at least at the beginning. The complete kit with the board and display would cost $20 plus shipping.

You can achieve a faster connection, without any external equipment. With faster processors and an onboard connector capable, you will need more power. Before Pi board for the power supply will be insufficient.

Orient Display sunlight readable TFT displays can be categorized into high brightness TFT displays, high contrast IPS displays, transflective TFT displays, Blanview TFT displays etc.

The brightness of our standard high brightness TFT displays can be from 700 to 1000 nits. With proper adding brightness enhancement film (BEF) and double brightness enhancement film (DBEF) and adjustment of the LED chips, Orient Display high brightness TFT products can achieve 1,500 to 2,000 nits or even higher luminance. Orient Display have special thermal management design to reduce the heat release and largely extend LED life time and reduce energy consumption.

Our high contrast and wide viewing angle IPS displays can achieve contrast ratio higher than 1000:1 which can make readability under strong sunlight with lower backlight luminance. High brightness IPS displays have been widely accepted by our customers with its superb display quality and it has become one of the best sellers in all our display category.Transflective display is an old monochrome display technology but it has been utilized in our color TFT line for sunlight readable application. Orient Display has 2.4” and 3.5” to choose from.

Blanview TFT displays are the new technology developed by Ortustech in Japan. It can provide around 40% of energy consumption for TFT panels which can use smaller rechargeable or disposable batteries and generate less heat. The price is also lower than traditional transflective TFT displays. Orient Display is partnering with the technology inventor to provide 4.3” and 5.0”.

Orient Display can also provide full customized or part customized solutions for our customers to enhance the viewing experience. Orient Display can provide all the different kinds of surface treatments, such as AR (Anti-reflection); AG (Anti-glare), AF (Anti-finger print or Anti-smudge); AS (Anti-smashing); AM (Anti-microbial) etc. Orient Display can also provide both dry bonding (OCA, Optical Clear Adhesive), or wet bonding (OCR, Optical Clear Resin and OCG, Optical Clear Glue) to get rid of light reflective in air bonding products to make the products much more readable under sunlight and be more robust.

Touch panels have been a much better human machine interface which become widely popular. Orient Display has been investing heavy for capacitive touch screen sensor manufacturing capacity. Now, Orient Display factory is No.1 in the world for automotive capacitive touch screen which took around 18% market share in the world automotive market.

Based on the above three types of touch panel technology, Orient Display can also add different kinds of features like different material glove touch, water environment touch, salt water environment touch, hover touch, 3D (force) touch, haptic touch etc. Orient Display can also provide from very low cost fixed area button touch, single (one) finger touch, double finger (one finger+ one gesture) touch, 5 finger touch, 10 points touch or even 16 points touch.

Considering the different shapes of the touch surface requirements, Orient Display can produce different shapes of 2D touch panel (rectangle, round, octagon etc.), or 2.5D touch screen (round edge and flat surface) or 3D (totally curved surface) touch panel.

Considering different strength requirements, Orient Display can provide low cost chemical tampered soda-lime glass, Asahi (AGC) Dragontrail glass and Corning high end Gorilla glass. With different thickness requirement, Orient Display can provide the thinnest 0.5mm OGS touch panel, to thickness more than 10mm tempered glass to prevent vandalizing, or different kinds of plastic touch panel to provide glass piece free (fear) or flexible substrates need.

Of course, Orient Display can also offer traditional RTP (Resistive Touch Panel) of 4-wire, 5-wire, 8-wire through our partners, which Orient Display can do integration to resistive touch screen displays.

Engineers are always looking for lower cost, faster, more convenient interfaces to transmit signals and to accept data and commands. The numbers of available interfaces available in the market can be dazzling. Orient Display follows market trends to produce various kind of interfaces for our customers to choose.

Genetic Interfaces: Those are the interfaces which display or touch controller manufacturers provide, including parallel, MCU, SPI(,Serial Peripheral Interface), I2C, RGB (Red Green Blue), MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface), LVDS (Low-Voltage Differential Signaling), eDP ( Embedded DisplayPort) etc. Orient Display has technologies to make the above interface exchangeable.

High Level Interfaces: Orient Display has technologies to make more advanced interfaces which are more convenient to non-display engineers, such as RS232, RS485, USB, VGA, HDMI etc. more information can be found in our serious products. TFT modules, Arduino TFT display, Raspberry Pi TFT display, Control Board.

In recent years, computing terminals have expanded exponentially from desktop to portable handheld devices. We have witnessed the rapid development of these devices. Complex operating systems being ported to tiny embedded hardware like Raspberry Pi, Cubieboard, routers with openWRT, etc. Those devices that has managed to become compact and easy to carry have being wide spread products and majority of them are on the Ghz level of processing power.

Supports any computing devices with USB Host communication functionality to act as a standard display or touch screen devices. You just need to add the corresponding driver. For the majority of embedded devices supporting Linux OS, we offer open source kernel driver and several OS images that you can try. Download the sources and adapt it to your project, or directly download the image and try it on any of the supported platforms:

The 5-inch capacitive raspberry pi TFT touch screen with cytma568 touch controller ic can support operation with gloves, water, and works well with additional 10mm thick tempered glass on the top, mainly used in outdoor handheld terminal, industrial field, smart home appliances and other fields, deep customization available.

The 5 inch capacitive raspberry pi tft touch screen module adopts the air bonding process, the capacitive touch screen is GG structure and has excellent anti-interference performance. It has black screen printing around and the interface is IIC. It can also directly export the USB interface through the IIC----USB board to achieve a free drive. The TFT LCD display resolution is 800*480, and the RGB interface, which can be compatible with various common Operation systems, it can be equipped with HDMI/VGA drive board and cable, which is more suitable for the installation of an embedded assemble the module.

Hangzhou Grahowlet Technology is a comprehensive service provider of capacitive touch screen modules and TFT LCD displays for various industries. In order to meet different requirements of worldwide customers, Hongxiao supply all kinds of product structures such as G + G, G + F (G + F + F ),P + G, etc. and various technical support programs such as Cypress, Atmel, EETI, FocalTech, Goodix, etc. according to different application environments. We provide solutions that match all customers’ touch screen needs and create products based on multiple technologies. We are committed to supplying global customers with first-class products and professional technical services in the touch industries. Our products are of high stability and anti-interference performance and are used in various industries with complicated and difficult conditions.

A: We have some mature projects cases and the best way is to connect the touch screen directly through USB interface to the Raspberry Pi or the orange Pi, and the display can be directly connected through HDMI interface, this way the whole solution can be implemented through plug and play.

For display, we can provide RGB to HDMI, LVDS to HDMI, MPI to HDMI, EDP to HDMI and other driver boards to realize the connection with Raspberry Pi and orange pi;