1.8 tft lcd 160x128 rgb free sample

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

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.

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.

Recently, I had the idea to make a digital picture frame—one of these kinds which load images from SD cards and show each image for some time. I was remembering myself that I already own a small TFT display, the KMR-1.8 SPI, that works out of the box with an Arduino Uno. When I digged up my KMR-1.8 SPI, I realized that it has also an in-built SD card reader. Moreover, I looked up the Internet and found ready-to-use libraries for the in-built SD card reader as well as showing images on the TFT display. For these reasons, I thought making such an digital picture frame will turn out very easy.

When I started to implement my first lines of codes and started to connect my Arduino Uno to the KMR-1.8 SPI, I ran into two major problems. First, the colors of my image file did not match to the colors displayed by the KMR-1.8 (red and blue were interchanged). Second, my first prototypes stopped to work after about 5 minutes. The application started to freeze and showed the same image forever instead of displaying the next image after a chosen time.

There exists various versions of so-called “1.8 TFT displays” from different manufacturers. Not all of them are 100% compatible to each other. Therefore, if you own a TFT display and want to use my tutorial to make it work, please check if your TFT display really matches the version I used in this tutorial:

The source code relies on three header files (and libraries): SPI.h (Link), SD.h (Link) and TFT.h (Link). Please make sure that all of them are correctly installed before trying out my source code (In Arduino IDE: Tools -> Manage Libraries…).

I overcame the first problem by not using the default initialization method (“TFTscreen.begin();”) of the TFT library. Instead, I looked up whats inside the “begin”-method. I found a method called “initR” which has a parameter that allows to perform the initialization for a specific chip. Here, the parameter value “INITR_BLACKTAB” worked for me as the colors were then shown correctly. In addition, I call the method “setRotation” with parameter value “1” in order to be conform to the default initialization method. In the end, the code for the setting up the TFT library object looks like this:// ...

Important Note: The image files on the SD card must be stored as BMP with a resolution of 160x128 pixels (width x height). Moreover, long file names and special characters must be avoided.

Recently, I had the idea to make a digital picture frame—one of these kinds which load images from SD cards and show each image for some time. I was remembering myself that I already own a small TFT display, the KMR-1.8 SPI, that works out of the box with an Arduino Uno. When I digged up my KMR-1.8 SPI, I realized that it has also an in-built SD card reader. Moreover, I looked up the Internet and found ready-to-use libraries for the in-built SD card reader as well as showing images on the TFT display. For these reasons, I thought making such an digital picture frame will turn out very easy.

When I started to implement my first lines of codes and started to connect my Arduino Uno to the KMR-1.8 SPI, I ran into two major problems. First, the colors of my image file did not match to the colors displayed by the KMR-1.8 (red and blue were interchanged). Second, my first prototypes stopped to work after about 5 minutes. The application started to freeze and showed the same image forever instead of displaying the next image after a chosen time.

There exists various versions of so-called “1.8 TFT displays” from different manufacturers. Not all of them are 100% compatible to each other. Therefore, if you own a TFT display and want to use my tutorial to make it work, please check if your TFT display really matches the version I used in this tutorial:

The source code relies on three header files (and libraries): SPI.h (Link), SD.h (Link) and TFT.h (Link). Please make sure that all of them are correctly installed before trying out my source code (In Arduino IDE: Tools -> Manage Libraries…).

I overcame the first problem by not using the default initialization method (“TFTscreen.begin();”) of the TFT library. Instead, I looked up whats inside the “begin”-method. I found a method called “initR” which has a parameter that allows to perform the initialization for a specific chip. Here, the parameter value “INITR_BLACKTAB” worked for me as the colors were then shown correctly. In addition, I call the method “setRotation” with parameter value “1” in order to be conform to the default initialization method. In the end, the code for the setting up the TFT library object looks like this:// ...

Important Note: The image files on the SD card must be stored as BMP with a resolution of 160x128 pixels (width x height). Moreover, long file names and special characters must be avoided.

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful small display shield . This TFT display is small (1.8" diagonal) bright (4pcs white-LED chips) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 128x160 pixels with individual pixel control.

We just love this little 1.8" TFT display, with true TFT color (up to 18-bits per pixel!), fine 160x128 resolution, two white LED backlight that runs on 3.3V and a very easy SPI interface that requires only 4 or 5 digital pins to send pixels to the display.

Please note! This is just the raw display, not attached to a PCB or for use with a breadboard. If you want to use this out of the box with no surface mount soldering, check out assembled 1.8" TFT breakout board. This display is for experts who are comfortable soldering a surface mount display using fine pitch soldering techniques! This display also is for 3.3V use only, so be sure to use a level shifter if you"re going to use it with 5.0V microcontrollers.

After tweaking the user_setup.h file I managed to get it to work.The settings that ware important to change was to change the ST7735 defines. Default I choose the first. This one didn"t work. I reduce SPI speed, which had no effect either. Than after some changes and tweaking connections and setting I finally worked. The ST7735 defines all work except the first one with my TFT-screen. I reset all to default and the SPI-speed and it kept working. It works at a 27 MHz speed, which leave me with 450 ms for the 11 test pages. If I increase the speed to the next value of 40 MHz I see errors in the display. So 27 MHz is max for me.

I also checked all other ST7735 defines, and for my TFT the ST7735_GREENTAB3 showed the correct colors. The other values show the wrong colors, but gave an image.