tft display im pins factory

TFT displays are full color LCDs providing bright, vivid colors with the ability to show quick animations, complex graphics, and custom fonts with different touchscreen options. Available in industry standard sizes and resolutions. These displays come as standard, premium MVA, sunlight readable, or IPS display types with a variety of interface options including HDMI, SPI and LVDS. Our line of TFT modules include a custom PCB that support HDMI interface, audio support or HMI solutions with on-board FTDI Embedded Video Engine (EVE2).

@peekay123, I am using hardware SPI. For the touch, I used Utouch library with four pins. I tied the LED to 3V, I can free up RST if I need a control pin, right now its tied to A0.

Strange, I just used dot factory to convert the " !"#$%&’()*+,-./0123456789", modified the start and end char as 0x20, 0x39, tft.print(“1. 31 1”); show up as 1.311 but no space.

I was afraid that you would said that regarding to the LED. Is that mean I need to modify Adafruit_ILI9341.cpp since “Adafruit_ILI9341::Adafruit_ILI9341(uint8_t cs, uint8_t dc, uint8_t rst)” take three pins? I am trying to use the RST pin to drive the transistor. Is there an easy way around this or just comment out the rst code would do? Thanks

@sheng, controlling the on/off duty cycle of a LED through a transistor WILL control its brightness. LEDs are current devices and using PWM changes the average current to the LED, thus controlling its brightness. Driving the LEDs of the display can’t be done directly from a GPIO pin since it can only supply a max of 20ma. Using a transistor will allow for more current (50-100ma) to drive the backlight LEDs.

@peekay123, by any chance, do you have a seven segment font or instruction on how to generate it? I been looking at the dot factory but I was not able to find it there. I am trying to generate size for 18, 26, 72. I am trying to test out which font looks better on tft screen. Any advice will be grateful.

@sheng, Adafruit’s tool only runs on Linux, is poorly documented and is not compatible with mfGFX font data structures. If it worked on Windows, I would have ported the new GFX library a long time ago!

If your using color TFT LCD Screens considering using the 4D systems displays because their PC programming software makes it a breeze to add custom fonts, images, and touch screen interfaces.

@RWB, How did you import the fonts into Dot Factory? I am using Dot Factory v.0.1.4 but I don’t see an option to import new font. On the Input section, I only see Text and Image but the Text option does not allow me to pick the location of new font.

In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

For this tutorial I composed three examples. The first example is distance measurement using ultrasonic sensor. The output from the sensor, or the distance is printed on the screen and using the touch screen we can select the units, either centimeters or inches.

The next example is controlling an RGB LED using these three RGB sliders. For example if we start to slide the blue slider, the LED will light up in blue and increase the light as we would go to the maximum value. So the sliders can move from 0 to 255 and with their combination we can set any color to the RGB LED,  but just keep in mind that the LED cannot represent the colors that much accurate.

As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.

Here’s the circuit schematic. We will use the GND pin, the digital pins from 8 to 13, as well as the pin number 14. As the 5V pins are already used by the TFT Screen I will use the pin number 13 as VCC, by setting it right away high in the setup section of code.

I will use the UTFT and URTouch libraries made by Henning Karlsen. Here I would like to say thanks to him for the incredible work he has done. The libraries enable really easy use of the TFT Screens, and they work with many different TFT screens sizes, shields and controllers. You can download these libraries from his website, RinkyDinkElectronics.com and also find a lot of demo examples and detailed documentation of how to use them.

After we include the libraries we need to create UTFT and URTouch objects. The parameters of these objects depends on the model of the TFT Screen and Shield and these details can be also found in the documentation of the libraries.

So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels  down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.

So the drawDistanceSensor() custom function needs to be called only once when the button is pressed in order to draw all the graphics of this example in similar way as we described for the home screen. However, the getDistance() custom function needs to be called repeatedly in order to print the latest results of the distance measured by the sensor.

Here’s that function which uses the ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance and print the values with SevenSegNum font in green color, either in centimeters or inches. If you need more details how the ultrasonic sensor works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. Back in the loop section we can see what happens when we press the select unit buttons as well as the back button.