stm32 tft display project supplier

Asia has long dominated the display module TFT LCD manufacturers’ scene. After all, most major display module manufacturers can be found in countries like China, South Korea, Japan, and India.

However, the United States doesn’t fall short of its display module manufacturers. Most American module companies may not be as well-known as their Asian counterparts, but they still produce high-quality display products for both consumers and industrial clients.

In this post, we’ll list down 7 best display module TFT LCD manufacturers in the USA. We’ll see why these companies deserve recognition as top players in the American display module industry.

STONE Technologies is a leading display module TFT LCD manufacturer in the world. The company is based in Beijing, China, and has been in operations since 2010. STONE quickly grew to become one of the most trusted display module manufacturers in 14 years.

Now, let’s move on to the list of the best display module manufacturers in the USA. These companies are your best picks if you need to find a display module TFT LCD manufacturer based in the United States:

Planar Systems is a digital display company headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon. It specializes in providing digital display solutions such as LCD video walls and large format LCD displays.

Planar’s manufacturing facilities are located in Finland, France, and North America. Specifically, large-format displays are manufactured and assembled in Albi, France.

Another thing that makes Planar successful is its relentless focus on its customers. The company listens to what each customer requires so that they can come up with effective display solutions to address these needs.

Microtips also provides value-added services to all its clients. The company’s Electronic Manufacturing Services team gives product suggestions and shares insights on how clients can successfully manage their projects.

What makes Microtips a great display module TFT LCD manufacturer in the USA lies in its close ties with all its customers. It does so by establishing a good rapport with its clients starting from the initial product discussions. Microtips manages to keep this exceptional rapport throughout the entire client relationship by:

Displaytech is an American display module TFT LCD manufacturer headquartered in Carlsbad, California. It was founded in 1989 and is part of several companies under the Seacomp group. The company specializes in manufacturing small to medium-sized LCD modules for various devices across all possible industries.

The company also manufactures embedded TFT devices, interface boards, and LCD development boards. Also, Displaytech offers design services for embedded products, display-based PCB assemblies, and turnkey products.

Displaytech makes it easy for clients to create their own customized LCD modules. There is a feature called Design Your Custom LCD Panel found on their site. Clients simply need to input their specifications such as their desired dimensions, LCD configuration, attributes, connector type, operating and storage temperature, and other pertinent information. Clients can then submit this form to Displaytech to get feedback, suggestions, and quotes.

Clients are assured of high-quality products from Displaytech. This is because of the numerous ISO certifications that the company holds for medical devices, automotive, and quality management. Displaytech also holds RoHS and REACH certifications.

A vast product range, good customization options, and responsive customer service – all these factors make Displaytech among the leading LCD manufacturers in the USA.

Products that Phoenix Display offers include standard, semi-custom, and fully-customized LCD modules. Specifically, these products comprise Phoenix Display’s offerings:

Phoenix Display also integrates the display design to all existing peripheral components, thereby lowering manufacturing costs, improving overall system reliability, and removes unnecessary interconnects.

Clients flock to Phoenix Display because of their decades-long experience in the display manufacturing field. The company also combines its technical expertise with its competitive manufacturing capabilities to produce the best possible LCD products for its clients.

True Vision Displays is an American display module TFT LCD manufacturing company located at Cerritos, California. It specializes in LCD display solutions for special applications in modern industries. Most of their clients come from highly-demanding fields such as aerospace, defense, medical, and financial industries.

The company produces several types of TFT LCD products. Most of them are industrial-grade and comes in various resolution types such as VGA, QVGA, XGA, and SXGA. Clients may also select product enclosures for these modules.

Slow but steady growth has always been True Vision Display’s business strategy. And the company continues to be known globally through its excellent quality display products, robust research and development team, top-of-the-line manufacturing facilities, and straightforward client communication.

All of their display modules can be customized to fit any kind of specifications their clients may require. Display modules also pass through a series of reliability tests before leaving the manufacturing line. As such, LXD’s products can withstand extreme outdoor environments and operates on a wide range of temperature conditions.

Cystalfontz America is a leading supplier and manufacturer of HMI display solutions. The company is located in Spokane Valley, Washington. It has been in the display solutions business since 1998.

Crystalfontz takes pride in its ISO 9001 certification, meaning the company has effective quality control measures in place for all of its products. After all, providing high-quality products to all customers remains the company’s topmost priority. Hence, many clients from small hobbyists to large top-tier American companies partner with Crystalfontz for their display solution needs.

We’ve listed the top 7 display module TFT LCD manufacturers in the USA. All these companies may not be as well-known as other Asian manufacturers are, but they are equally competent and can deliver high-quality display products according to the client’s specifications. Contact any of them if you need a US-based manufacturer to service your display solutions needs.

We also briefly touched on STONE Technologies, another excellent LCD module manufacturer based in China. Consider partnering with STONE if you want top-of-the-line smart LCD products and you’re not necessarily looking for a US-based manufacturer. STONE will surely provide the right display solution for your needs anywhere you are on the globe.

The LCD I am using is a 2.8″ TFT LCD with SPI communication. I also have another 16-bit Parallel TFT LCD but it will be another story for another time. For this post, let’s focus on how to display what you want on the 2.8″ LCD. You can find all details about this LCD from this page:http://www.lcdwiki.com/2.8inch_SPI_Module_ILI9341_SKU:MSP2807

First thing first, this LCD use SPI as the main communication protocol with your MCU. For STM32 users, HAL Library has already implemented this protocol which makes this project easier for us. But, a little knowledge about this protocol does not hurt anyone. SPI is short for Serial Peripheral Interface which, aside from two data lines, also has a clock line and select lines to choose between devices you want to communicate with.

This LCD uses ILI9341 as a single-chip SOC driver for a display with a resolution of 240×320. More details can be found in the official document of ILI9341. But the most important thing is that we have to establish astart sequencein order for this LCD to work. The “start sequence” includes many other sequences which are also defined in the datasheet. Each sequence starts when you send a command to ILI9341 and then some parameters to follow up. This sequence is applied for all communication between MCU and ILI9341.

For this project, I recommend using theSystem Workbench for STM32for coding and building the code. After installing and open the program, go to the source code you have just downloaded and double click the.cprojectfile. It will automatically be open in your IDE. Then build the program by right click on the folder you just open (TFTLCD) and chooseBuild Project. Wait for it to finish and upload it to the board by right clicking the folder, choose Run As and then clickAc6 STM32C/C++ Application. And that’s it for running the example.

The most important library for this project is obviously the ILI9341_Driver. This driver is built from the provided source code in the lcdwiki.com page. I only choose the part that we need to use the most in many applications like writing string, displaying image and drawing symbols. Another library from the wiki page is the TOUCH library. Most of the libraries I got from the Internet were not working properly due to some adjustments to the original one.

To draw symbols or even display images, we need a “byte array” of that image or symbol. As an illustration, to display an image from a game called Transistor, I have a “byte array” of that image stored in a file named transistor.h. You can find this file in the link below. Then, I draw each pixel from the image to the LCD by adding the code in the Display_Picture() function in the Display folder.void Display_Picture()

The above example is just only for displaying black and white image. In order to show a color image, we need to a little bit different. First, go tothis websiteto generate the array of the colour image. Remember to change your size to 320×240 and choose the 65K color option. Because it now takes up two bytes for one pixel, we need to send two bytes at once. You can check the Display_Color_Picture() function in the Display folder.void Display_Color_Picture()

Beijing STONE Technology co., ltd was established in 2010 and devoted itself to manufacturing and developing high-quality intelligent TFT LCD display modules.

Our vision is to become one of the world"s top display manufacturers in the industrial intelligent field. And providing top-quality products and professional technical services to customers all over the world.

Our core TFT LCD display modules integrate a CPU, flash memory, and touch screen in the hardware unit. Paired with an easy-to-use free GUI design software and complete instruction set, customers can avoid time-consuming accessories selection and system integration tasks. These units greatly reduce the workload in HMI development and make the entire process faster and easier.

The modules come with a UART TFT serial interface that can be controlled by any MCU through the simple but powerful instruction set like the 8051 series, AVR series, MSP430 Series, STM32 series, MC9S12, and Arduino series, among others.

Each TFT display LCD module has a wide range of applications, such as automated system control, vending machine functionality, intelligent lockers, electricity equipment (oiling machine, EV charger), elevators, smart home and office, precision instruments, and much more.

To date, we have delivered custom display solutions to over 3000 customers around the world. Our TFT LCD modules have been widely praised for their quality and performance and that is in large part thanks to our partners, including NI, Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, and many others. These long-term cooperative relationships have been mutually beneficial and we hope to continue a long history of success.

STM32CubeIDE actually makes it pretty easy to compile our work and get it onto the STM32 chip.  The first step is to produce the compiled .elf ( a binary version of our code).  To generate the .elf, we need to do a build. This is as easy as pressing the build button on the toolbar.

As you learn about more of your microcontroller’s peripherals and start to work with more types of sensors and actuators, you will probably want to add small displays to your projects. Previously, I wrote about creating a simple program to draw data to an SSD1331 OLED display, but while they look great, the small size and low resolution can be limiting. Fortunately, the larger (and slightly cheaper) ILI9341 TFT display module uses a nearly-identical SPI communication protocol, so this tutorial will build on that previous post by going over how to draw to a 2.2″ ILI9341 module using the STM32’s hardware SPI peripheral.

We’ll cover the basic steps of setting up the required GPIO pins, initializing the SPI peripheral, starting the display, and then finally drawing pixel colors to it. This tutorial won’t read any data from the display, so we can use the hardware peripheral’s MISO pin for other purposes and leave the TFT’s MISO pin disconnected. And as with my previous STM32 posts, example code will be provided for both the STM32F031K6 and STM32L031K6 ‘Nucleo’ boards.

As with most STM32 projects, the first thing we should do is enable the peripherals that we will use. In this case, that’s just GPIOA, GPIOB, and SPI1. As in previous STM32 posts, I will use the device header files provided by ST for basic peripheral variable definitions, and determine the target chip from definitions passed in from the Makefile:

With the peripherals powered on, we need to set up the GPIO pins used for communicating with the screen. To power the SSD1331 display in my previous tutorial, we configured all of the pins as ordinary push-pull outputs; as a quick refresher, we’ll use the SCK (Clock), MOSI (Data output), CS (Chip Select), D/C (Data or Command?), and RST (Reset) pins. The only difference with using the hardware peripheral is that we should configure the MOSI and SCK pins as ‘alternate function’ with high-speed output.

There are actually multiple sets of pins mapped to the SPI1 peripheral, even on the 32-pin STM32xKx chips. I’ll use pin B3 for SCK and pin B5 for MOSI. Pin B4 is mapped to MISO, but I’ll use it as a general-purpose output to drive the D/C pin on the TFT. As long as the MISO pin is not configured as ‘alternate function’, the peripheral will ignore it and we can use pin B4 as a normal GPIO pin. Finally, pins A12 and A15 are mapped to CS and RST respectively:

With the pins set up, it is also a good idea to set them all to a known starting state, and tell the ILI9341 display to reset by pulling the ‘Reset’ pin low/high with a delay to give the display time to perform its reset sequence:

I don’t want to complicate things by covering timers or precisely-timed assembly code in this tutorial, so I’m using a simple (but inaccurate) ‘delay_cycles’ method to give the display plenty of time to reset itself. If you want to use a better time-based delay, try waiting for about 100-150 milliseconds.

The STM32’s SPI peripheral resets to a convenient state for simple communication, but there are still a few options that we need to configure. First up is the clock ‘polarity’ and ‘phase’ – the SCK clock pin will toggle up and down as data is sent, and these two bits tell the peripheral when the data pins should be written and read. The ‘clock polarity’ defines the clock pin’s resting state when data is not being transferred, and the ‘clock phase’ defines whether the devices should read data on the ‘falling’ or ‘rising’ edge of the clock signal. The ILI9341 seems to like a polarity and phase of either 1 and 1 or 0 and 0; you can inspect the timing diagram in its datasheet, or just try and see what works best.

Next, we need to tell the peripheral that the STM32 will be the one initiating communications by setting its MSTR flag. And to avoid unnecessary complexity, it is also a good idea to tell the STM32’s SPI peripheral not to use its hardware CS pin – just like the ILI9341 has a CS (‘Chip Select’) pin which tells it whether it should listen to the clock/data lines, I think that the STM32 has a similar CS signal which tells it whether to read/write, called NSS in the datasheets. Fortunately, we can ignore all of that by using a software ‘Chip Select’ signal (the SSM flag) and leaving it ‘high’ to permanently enable communication (the SSI flag):

Then all we have to do is set the PE (Peripheral Enable) flag to start communications. The ILI9341 expects its data to be sent with the MSB (Most-Significant Bit) first with 8 bits per data frame, but those are the default reset settings on the STM32’s SPI peripheral so we don’t need to change them:

First, the STM32 has a small queue which it can use to store a few bytes of data while it is busy sending, and we shouldn’t try to send data if that queue is full. The peripheral sets a TXE (‘Transmit Buffer Empty’) flag when it is ready for new data to be written. This means that our ‘write 8 bits’ function should wait for that flag to be set before continuing:

I actually couldn’t get the STM32L0 line to write the full 16 bits this way – I think they have a slightly different peripheral configuration. Anyways, for the ILI9341’s “4-Wire” SPI protocol, we also need to write a ‘send command byte’ method which pulls the D/C pin low during communication. Since we don’t want to change the D/C pin while the peripheral is still sending data in its transmit queue, we should wait for the peripheral’s BSY (Busy) flag to be cleared before changing the state of the D/C GPIO pin:

Initializing the display and drawing to it isn’t too difficult, but if the previous steps aren’t done properly, it can be frustrating to debug the communications. If you run into problems, you can also use the same ‘software SPI’ methods presented in the previous SSD1331 tutorial – just don’t forget to set the SCK and MOSI pins as ‘output’ instead of ‘alternate function’ if you decide to try that.

The pins on your ILI9341 module should be labeled, although if you are using a generic module the labels might be on the back side of the board. The connections are about what you would expect; plug the VCC and LED pins into your board’s +3.3V supply, and connect GND to Ground. The CS, RESET, DC/RS, SDI/MOSI, and SCK pins should connect to the corresponding microcontroller pins, and the SDO/MISO pin can be left unconnected. DC/RS is a different acronym for our D/C ‘Data/Command’ pin, and SDO/SDI are starting to become popular labels on SPI boards – they stand for ‘Serial Data Out/In’, so SDI on the listening device corresponds to the MOSI SPI line and SDO is not needed since we won’t be listening to the display.

When the ILI9341 first powers on it should show a uniform bright white color, but that’s just the backlight LEDs. The display will not try to show anything at all until it is initialized. Be aware that a broken display might still show a bright white screen when power is applied, but these modules are fairly sturdy. I’ve gone so far as to pry them apart and remove the backlights, and the panels worked even after being bluntly removed from the case.

So short of taking a hammer to the screen, you shouldn’t be able to damage them too much by bumping them around or dropping them from a tabletop. Anyways, to start the display and put it into a state where it can draw things, we need to send it a series of startup commands. Like with the SSD1331 display, most commands are followed by one or more ‘option’ bytes, but unlike the SSD1331, those ‘option’ bytes should be sent with the D/C pin held high, not low. You can see all of the commands in the ILI9341 datasheet, but some commands appear to be undocumented, so it is a good idea to look at an existing library for a starting sequence that should work for most purposes.

After the display is reset and those commands are sent, the display should change to a flickering grey color. That tells you that the display is all set up and ready to go, but it has not received any pixel data yet so it is not showing any colors.

To draw to the display, we go through a similar process as we did with the SSD1331; send commands to say which rectangular area we want to draw to, then send one 16-bit color for each pixel in that rectangular area.

To refresh the entire 240 x 320 display, we can set the drawing area to be between (0, 0) and (239, 319) and then draw 320 * 240 = 76,800 pixels of data. That’s a lot of data – even at one bit per pixel, the small chips used in this example would not have enough RAM to store a full framebuffer. You’d need over 600KB of RAM to store a full 16 bits of color per pixel, so we’ll only draw some solid colors in this tutorial.

And that’s all there is to it! As the program runs, your display should cycle between a red and blue color as fast as the chip can send data. This could be made even faster by using hardware interrupts and/or DMA transfers, but that is a topic for a future tutorial.

The ILI9341 is a good display driver to know how to use. Screens using it come in sizes from about 2.2″ – 3.2″ with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, and they are very affordable. Their contrast is not as good as the SSD1331 OLED displays, but they get you a lot more pixels on a hobbyist’s budget.

So all in all, they’re nice choices for small applications which need an easy-to-read display. I’ve seen them used in devices ranging from handheld oscilloscopes to CNC machines. Chime in if you wind up making anything with one!

The ST7789 TFT module contains a display controller with the same name: ST7789. It’s a color display that uses SPI interface protocol and requires 3, 4 or 5 control pins, it’s low cost and easy to use. This display is an IPS display, it comes in different sizes (1.3″, 1.54″ …) but all of them should have the same resolution of 240×240 pixel, this means it has 57600 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (not 5V tolerant).

The ST7789 display module shown in project circuit diagram has 7 pins: (from right to left): GND (ground), VCC, SCL (serial clock), SDA (serial data), RES (reset), DC (or D/C: data/command) and BLK (back light).

As mentioned above, the ST7789 TFT display controller works with 3.3V only (power supply and control lines). The display module is supplied with 3.3V (between VCC and GND) which comes from the Arduino board.

To connect the Arduino to the display module, I used voltage divider for each line which means there are 4 voltage dividers. Each voltage divider consists of 2.2k and 3.3k resistors, this drops the 5V into 3V which is sufficient.

The first library is a driver for the ST7789 TFT display which can be installed from Arduino IDE library manager (Sketch —> Include Library —> Manage Libraries …, in the search box write “st7789” and install the one from Adafruit).

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.