mcufriend tft lcd raspberry made in china

I bought four MCU Friend 3.5″ TFT shields.  And, unfortunately, they have spiraled me into a deep, dark place trying to figure out how to use them.  The the documentation consists of a sticker on the antistatic bag, a picture of the shield with a list of 5 different possible LCD drivers, a pinout, and a block of code that supposedly represents the startup code.  The unfortunate part is that none of these have been exactly right – they all have errors.  This article is a description of the journey to figuring out how to use them.

It also has a picture which says the LCD has one of several different controllers (and after digging in I know for a fact that two of mine were made by Raydium and are not on the list)

The first thing I did was try to use the MCUFRIEND_kbv library to see if the screens worked.  The first board identified as ID=0x9403 and did not work.  Apparently, the tool just spits out the ID if it doesn’t know it, which it did not.

One of the boards identified as ID=0x6814 worked perfectly, and one had a blue cast to all of the screens.  The crazy part is the two boards that identified as ID=0x6814 had different PCBs.  According to the comments in the MCUFRIEND_kbv.cpp ID=0x6814 is an RM68140 and ID=9403 is unknown.

Next, I started down the path of trying to figure out what the controllers were by using register reads.  David Prentice (the guy who wrote/maintains the MCU Friend_kbv Arduino library) has an absolute ton of responses on the Arduino forum trying to help people figure out what their shield is.  He asks them to post the register report from his example program LCD_ID_readnew which is included as an example in the library.

When you look at these LCD controllers they all have some variant of “Read ID” which responds with 1-6 bytes.  The basic idea of this program is to look at what bytes are returned to try to identify the controller.  Here is an example of what I got when I ran the LCD_ID_readnew program on my shields:

The key thing to see in this output is the register 0x04 which says 54,80,66 which identifies this as a Raydium RM68140 LCD controller.  Here is a snapshot from the data sheet.

After digging some more, I decided that it is super ugly out there, as you find that there are a significant number of LCD controllers that are clones, copies, pirated etc… and that they all present themselves differently.  And, in hindsight I think that this is the reason that my ILI9341 from the previous article doesnt quite work correctly.

The next thing that I did was try out the startup code that MCUFriend_kbv generates.  I used the same technique from PSoC 6 + Segger EmWin + MCUFriend 2.4″ Part 1 and spit out the startup bytes.  Here they are:

At this point I have spent a frightening amount of time figuring out how these screens work.  Although it has been a good learning experience, I have generally decided that using unknown displays from China with LCD drivers of questionable origin is not worth the pain of trying to sort out the interface.  Beyond that:

Actually a cheap color display has lot of advantages over any other type displays. Monochrome graphic LCD display actually costs same. Other options of cheap display is Nokia 5110 Display (which is often reported by many users as buggy), standard 1602A LCD Display (which is an all purpose standard basic LCD display). Here is Getting Started Guide For Arduino TFT Touch Screen Shield Manufactured by MCUFRIEND. This is possibly the cheapest 2.4″ color display for Arduino. It costs around $8 to $10. MCUFriend is a China company and has an useless website. However, all over the web, there is huge support for this cheap display. The display works as intended. I purchased it from physical shop. It is a 2.4″ diagonal LCD TFT display, has white-LED backlight, resistive touchscreen, 240×320 resolution, has SPFD 5408 controller with built in video RAM buffer, has 8 bit digital interface and 4 control lines, it uses digital pins 5-13 and analog 0-3. there is a micro SD card reader.

Obviously! Except China none can give such thing at that price. Commonly with a microcontroller like Arduino, we are not going to do huge graphic intensive works unlike Raspberry Pi. You can save the money for Raspberry Pi’s good display. Our basic usage commonly will be making clock, calculator, showing some tracing from sensor, temperature humidity and so on. This quality of display usually enough.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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)

there are (now) a lot of 2.8" TFT Pi designs out there. I believe mine was the first, and has been around in one form or another for over a year now. I offer full support on this forum, and here is the support thread :

This post explains about how to display text on TFT lcd using arduino uno? TFT which is used in the tutorial is 2.4′ TFT by Mcufriend. It has ST7781 controller in it, Driver code is ST7783. This 2.4 inch TFT Lcd is arduino compatible. It can easily be mounted on an Arduino uno board. This TFT can be interfaced in 32,16 and 8 bit parallel mode. It also supports I2c Mode. In this tutorial i am going to interface it in 8-bit parallel mode with arduino uno.

Project code is below. I am not using any predefined library for displaying text on TFT lcd, I actually didn’t find any library that can properly display text on the TFT i have, all the libraries through which i have gone through were unable to initialize my lcd driver properly. So i decided to first read the driver of the TFT and then write my own code according to the driver supported commands. I first read the TFT Driver. To learn about how to check the TFT Lcd driver just go through this small tutorial.

After reading the driver of TFT i went through its datasheet. The TFT which i have is working with ST7781 controller, it’s a Chinese manufactured TFT by Mcufriend, their website says that the TFT is working on ILI9321 driver but its not. The information on ther website is misleading everyone, I have seen many posts on internet that talks about the Mcufriend TFT Lcd driver. So if you have a TFT and you are unable to find its driver than go through the above tutorial.

The TFT use in project can easily be mounted on any Arduino board. I mounted it on Arduino uno. You can also use any other Arduino board but for that you have to make changes in the code.

Changing the code is not a hard task if you understand the code written below. Coming to the Code. I first initialized the TFT Controlling pins LCD_RST, LCD_CS, LCD_RS, LCD_WR, LCD_RD. In the Setup function I made the Port-D and Port-B of Arduino Uno as output Port. Since the data pins of TFT is interfacing with Port-D and Port-B of Arduino so to write data and commands to TFT we have to declare Port-D and Port-B as output. Then the function InitializeTFT() is initializing the TFT.

In the Loop function i am filling TFT with colours. Colors are filled in Horizontal and vertical directions. According to the data sheet which says you can display text on TFT in eight directions.

The Code above will fill TFT with colors and the code below is displaying text “www.microcontroller-project.com” on TFT. Try to first understand the above code before moving to the code below. Above code is simply a method to fill the pixels of TFT. If you grabbed the process of filling TFT Pixels than you can display any text on lcd by manipulating the pixels.

I changed the Adafruit libraries for TFT: GFX , TFTLCD and TouchScreen. I join all in this one library, the library SPFD5408, to avoid problems with duplicate libraries and enables also have the original library Adafruit ready for use in other projects with another TFT hardware.

/TFT_eSPI/Processors/TFT_eSPI_RP2040.c:39:6: error: #error The Arduino RP2040 MBED board package is not supported when PIO is used. Use the community package by Earle Philhower.

※Price Increase NotificationThe TFT glass cell makers such as Tianma,Hanstar,BOE,Innolux has reduced or stopped the production of small and medium-sized tft glass cell from August-2020 due to the low profit and focus on the size of LCD TV,Tablet PC and Smart Phone .It results the glass cell price in the market is extremely high,and the same situation happens in IC industry.We deeply regret that rapidly rising costs for glass cell and controller IC necessitate our raising the price of tft display.We have made every attempt to avoid the increase, we could accept no profit from the beginning,but the price is going up frequently ,we"re now losing a lot of money. We have no choice if we want to survive. There is no certain answer for when the price would go back to the normal.We guess it will take at least 6 months until these glass cell and semiconductor manufacturing companies recover the production schedule. (Mar-03-2021)

ER-TFTV050A1-1 is 480x272 dots 5" color tft lcd module display with small HDMI signal driver board,optional capacitive touch panel with USB controller board and cable and 4-wire resistive touch panel with USB driver board and cable, optional remote control,superior display quality,super wide view angle.It can be used in any embedded systems,car,industrial device,security and hand-held equipment which requires display in high quality and colorful video. It"s also ideal for Raspberry PI by HDMI.

Nothing can be compared when you can put your hard work to display on a 4” TFT display- From one end to the other end it"s 480*360 pixel to play with. 4” TFT Analog-GPS clock on Arduino

Every electronic hobbyist dreams to display his work on display – be it LCD, GLCD (64*128), OLED or TFT . LCDs are the oldest type of displays. If putting your work on LCD or GLCD is great then putting it on OLED is certainly greater but nothing can be compared when you can put your hard work to display on a 4” TFT display. From one end to the other end it"s 480*360 pixel to put up with and it"s very very impressive.

The latest Chinese TFT displays are very cheap and works perfectly with Arduino & Raspberry Pi. The TFT ILI9488 display costs about $8 on aliexpress.com. There are two varieties available one with 26 pins 13*2 DIL and the other is with pins aligned exactly to sit on an UNO board.

Arduino style – Directly sits exactly on an Arduino UNO board. The major disadvantage is that once it sits on an UNO board one can hardly use any other GPIO pins for other usages. Both these styles I"ve used for creating art works on Arduino & Raspberry Pi. The Arduino type has an extra SDCard attached and gets connected to the SPI (D-10,11,12,13) pins when inserted.

Hurdles:The main hurdles that I faced with these type of displays is that they are not common and all are made by mcufrends.com. Fortunately the mcufriends.com itself has made and freely distributed the MCUFRIEND_kbd.h header files which works out of the box for these displays and many other type of similar displays. The other header file that are required for this displays are Adafruit_GFX.h [both these header files are added in the archieve]

While the pin connections of the Arduino type is pretty clear and straight forward the same on Raspberry Pi type is not clear at all. However, here"s my hard work for you to make your life easy ! [See the connection diagram for both the types]

While the Arduino type shield is fairly easy to connect but difficult to attach other devices , the Raspberry Pi type shield is little difficult to find out the pin details but it has extremely easy & compact interface while fitted up . Here"s the 26 pin DIL pin details which will go to the same pins of Arduino.

These shields are basically for 3.3 volt operations. But upto 5 volt it works , However, prolong operation on 5 volt is not recommended as it gets heated up profusely. In case you want to free some other Arduino pins then you look into the mcufriend_shield.h file and re-write the connections as I shifted some connections to alternate pins.

The connections are easy as shown in the schematic diagrams. Since all the top portion of the UNO is covered by the TFT shield, the connections for the LM-35, GPS receiver is taken from the bottom side of the UNO shield.

Software: This is real fun ! With small strokes of code the TFT behaves differently and opens up many different ways of displaying the output. Creating a thick line, making the hands move smoothly was real challenge as the Adafruit_GFX is not so much developed but a look back to the high school trigonometry is all that you need to make it all happen for you.

3.5inch RPi LCD (A) and 3.5inch RPi LCD (B) are hardware compatible with each other (uses different driver), and can be mutually substituted in most cases. (A) for low cost ver. while (B) for IPS ver. with better displaying.

Why the LCD doesn"t work with my Raspbian?To use the LCD with the Raspberry Pi official image, driver (SPI touch interface only) should be installed first. Please refer to the user manual.

However, for the first testing, you may want to use our image directly (if provided).Why the LCD still doesn"t work with the Waveshare provided image?Make sure the hardware connection is correct and connects fine.

The PWR will keep on and the ACT will keep blinking when the Raspberry Pi starts up successfully, in case both of the two LEDs keep on, it is possible that the image was burnt incorrectly OR the TF card was in bad contact.Which power supply should I use?It is recommended to use a 5V/3A power adapter for the Raspberry Pi other than USB connection, otherwise the Pi may failed to start up because the PC"s USB port might have not enough power.

Since the first-generation Raspberry Pi released, Waveshare has been working on designing, developing, and producing various fantastic touch LCDs for the Pi. Unfortunately, there are quite a few pirated/knock-off products in the market. They"re usually some poor copies of our early hardware revisions, and comes with none support service.