nextion hmi tft lcd arduino made in china

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface （HMI） solution combining an onboard processor and memory touch display with Nextion Editor software for HMI GUI project development.

Using the Nextion Editor software, you can quickly develop the HMI GUI by drag-and-drop components (graphics, text, button, slider, etc.) and ASCII text-based instructions for coding how components interact on the display side.

Nextion HMI display connects to peripheral MCU via TTL Serial (5V, TX, RX, GND) to provide event notifications that peripheral MCU can act on, the peripheral MCU can easily update progress, and status back to Nextion display utilizing simple ASCII text-based instructions.

Nextion is a Seamless Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution that provides a control and visualisation interface between a human and a process, machine, application or appliance. Nextion is mainly applied to IoT or consumer electronics field. It is the best solution to replace the traditional LCD and LED Nixie tube.

This solution includes hardware part - a series of TFT boards and software part - Nextion editor. Nextion TFT board uses only one serial port to do communicating. Let you get rid of the wiring trouble. We notice that most engineers spend much time in application development but get unpleasant results.

In this situation, Nextion editor has mass components such as button, text, progress bar, slider, instrument panel etc. to enrich your interface design. And the drag-and-drop function ensures that you spend less time in programming, which will reduce your 99% development workloads. With the help of this WYSIWYG editor, GUI designing is a piece of cake.

This is a powerful 3.5"" HMI, which is member of Nextion family. Features include: a 3.5" TFT 480 x320 resistive touch screen display, 4M Flash, 2KByte RAM, 65k colors.

This post is an introduction to the Nextion display with the Arduino. We’re going to show you how to configure the display for the first time, download the needed resources, and how to integrate it with the Arduino UNO board. We’ll also make a simple graphical user interface to control the Arduino pins.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution. Nextion displays are resistive touchscreens that makes it easy to build a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a great solution to monitor and control processes, being mainly applied to IoT applications.

The Nextion has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls the display, for example it takes care of generating the buttons, creating text, store images or change the background. The Nextion communicates with any microcontroller using serial communication at a 9600 baud rate.

To design the GUI, you use the Nextion Editor, in which you can add buttons, gauges, progress bars, text labels, and more to the user interface in an easy way. We have the 2.8” Nextion display basic model, that is shown in the following figure.

The best model for you, will depend on your needs. If you’re just getting started with Nextion, we recommend getting the 3.2” size which is the one used in the Nextion Editor examples (the examples also work with other sizes, but you need to make some changes). Additionally, this is the most used size, which means more open-source examples and resources for this size.

To get started with Nextion, first you need to install Nextion Editor. Go to https://nextion.itead.cc/, select the Resources tab, Download > Nextion Editor and install Nextion Editor. You can either download the .zip file or the .exe file.

Connecting the Nextion display to the Arduino is very straightforward. You just need to make four connections: GND, RX, TX, and +5V. These pins are labeled at the back of your display, as shown in the figure below.

You can power up the Nextion display directly from the Arduino 5V pin, but it is not recommended. Working with insufficient power supply may damage the display. So, you should use an external power source. You should use a 5V/1A power adaptor with a micro USB cable. Along with your Nextion display, you’ll also receive a USB to 2 pin connector, useful to connect the power adaptor to the display.

The best way to get familiar with a new software and a new device is to make a project example. Here we’re going to create a user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins, and display data.

The user interface has two pages: one controls two LEDs connected to the Arduino pins, and the other shows data gathered from the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor;

We won’t cover step-by-step how to build the GUI in the Nextion display. But we’ll show you how to build the most important parts, so that you can learn how to actually build the user interface. After following the instructions, you should be able to complete the user interface yourself.

Open Nextion Editor and go to File > New to create a new file. Give it a name and save it. Then, a window pops up to chose your Nextion model, as show in the figure below.

We’ll start by adding a background image. To use an image as a background, it should have the exact same dimensions as your Nextion display. We’re using the 2.8” display, so the background image needs to be 240×320 pixels. Check your display dimensions and edit your background image accordingly. As an example, we’re using the following image:

All components have an attribute called objname. This is the name of the component. Give good names to your components because you’ll need them later for the Arduino code. Also note that each component has one id number that is unique to that component in that page. The figure below shows the objname and id for the slider.

You should trigger an event for the touchable components (the buttons and the slider) so that the Arduino knows that a component was touched. You can trigger events when you press or when you release a component.

Notice that we have labels to hold the units like “ºC”, “ºF” and “%”, and empty labels that will be filled with the readings when we have our Arduino code running.

Once the GUI is ready, you need to write the Arduino code so that the Nextion can interact with the Arduino and vice-versa. Writing code to interact with the Nextion display is not straightforward for beginners, but it also isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

A good way to learn how to write code for the Arduino to interact with the Nextion display is to go to the examples folder in the Nextion library folder and explore. You should be able to copy and paste code to make the Arduino do what you want.

The first thing you should do is to take note of your components in the GUI that will interact with the Arduino and take note of their ID, names and page. Here’s a table of all the components the code will interact to (your components may have a different ID depending on the order you’ve added them to the GUI).

In this post we’ve introduced you to the Nextion display. We’ve also created a simple application user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins. The application built is just an example for you to understand how to interface different components with the Arduino – we hope you’ve found the instructions as well as the example provided useful.

In our opinion, Nextion is a great display that makes the process of creating user interfaces simple and easy. Although the Nextion Editor has some issues and limitations it is a great choice for building interfaces for your electronics projects. We have a project on how to create a Node-RED physical interface with the Nextion display and an ESP8266 to control outputs. Feel free to take a look.

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.

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.

In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work  you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:

Nowadays home automation is a trending topic among electronic enthusiasts and even the mass population. People are busy with their life challenges, so an electronic device should take care of the home instead! The majority of such devices need internet or Wi-Fi for connectivity or they don’t offer a user-friendly GUI, but I decided to design a standalone wireless monitoring/controlling unit that can be adjusted using a graphical and touch-controlled LCD display.

The device consists of a panelboard and a mainboard that communicate using 315MHz (or 433MHz) ASK transceivers. The panel side is equipped with a high-quality 4.3” capacitive-touch Nextion Display. The user can monitor the live temperature values and define the action threshold (to activate/deactivate the heater or cooler), humidity (to activate/deactivate the humidifier or dehumidifier), and ambient light (to turn ON/OFF the lights). The mainboard is equipped with 4 Relays to activate/deactivate the aforementioned loads.

To design the schematic and PCB, I used Altium Designer 23. The fast component search engine (octopart) allowed me to quickly consider components’ information and also generate the BOM. To get high-quality fabricated boards, I sent the Gerber files to PCBWay. I used the Arduino IDE to write the MCU code, so it is pretty easy to follow and understand. Designing a GUI using the Nextion tools was a pleasant experience that I will certainly follow for similar projects in the future. So let’s get started :-)

The heart of the circuit is the IC1 (ATMega328 microcontroller) [4], the same chip as the Arduino Nano. I used a 16MHz crystal for the clock source. C9 ... C13 are decoupling capacitors. The ISP is a 5-pin male pin header to connect an ISP programmer (such as the USBasp or similar) to burn the HEX file into the chip. R1 is a 10K pull-up resistor for the Reset pin, to avoid unwanted triggering of the Reset (active-low).

There is a high similarity between the circuit of the panelboard and the mainboard, the main difference is the Nextion display connector. The Nextion display uses the UART or Serial interface. C16 and C17 are decoupling capacitors.

You must install several external libraries to be able to modify and re-compile the code if you like. The first one is the Adafruit SHTC3 library [8], the second is the RadioHead Packet Radio library [9], the third is the TaskScheduler library [10], and the last one is the Easy Nextion library [11]. I have provided the complied HEX file for the panelboard [12] and the mainboard [13] as well. Below is the code for the panelboard.

As I mentioned earlier, you should use an external AVR ISP programmer (such as the cheap USBasp [14], official Atmel programmer, or whatever similar) to program the microcontroller of both the panelboard and the mainboard. That’s why I have provided an ISP interface for the boards. To compile the code, you should select Arduino Nano in the “board” selection menu. To generate the HEX file, you can press Ctrl + Alt + S.

As it is clear in the YouTube video, I used a 4.3” Nextion HMI Display, Intelligent Series (Model: NX4827P043-011C-Y) [15]. The TFT file is available for download [16]. You must copy-paste this file into a MicroSD card and upgrade the Flash memory of your Nextion Display. There are many tutorials about this, so I skip this step. Figure 7 shows a picture of this display.

Figure 8 shows the assembled PCB boards and the Nextion display. The smallest component package size is 0805, you shouldn’t have any problem in soldering the components, however, if you have some difficulties to purchase the components or there is no time for hand soldering, you can order the boards assembled.

The 7" Nextion HMI LCD Touch Display is a Seamless Human Machine Interface (HMI) display module solution that provides a control and visualisation interface for any Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits. Nextion is mainly applied to IoT or consumer electronics field. It is the best solution to replace the traditional LCD and LED Nixie tube, and, it is best intelligent display module on the market.

The 7" Nextion HMI LCD Touch Display is a Seamless Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution that provides a control and visualisation interface between a human and a process, machine, application or appliance. It is the best solution to replace the traditional LCD and LED Nixie tube.

Nextion Editor is a free human-machine interface (HMI) GUI development software for Nextion Basic Series, Discovery Series, Enhanced Series, and Intelligent Series. The software offers an easy way to create an intuitive and superb touch user interface even for beginners. Add a static picture as a background, define functions by components, you can make a simple GUI in minutes. The easy Drag-and-Drop components and simple ASCll text-based instructions will dramatically reduce your HMI project development workloads and develop projects rapidly in a cost-effective way. The Nextion product is the best balance HMI solution between cost and benefit with a low and decreased learning curve.

Debug the HMI project at any time even without the Nextion Display.The instruction input area allows you to send any Nextion commands to check the feedback and interactions.

Why use Nextion ? -Firstly, Nextion is easy to use. With the Nextion Editor software, you can easily create an intuitive touch user interface even if you are a beginner.

-With the drag and drop components and simple ASCII text-based instructions, you do not have to spend a huge amount of time on your HMI project development.

Nextion Display Connection Nextion display has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls display, for example it takes care of generating buttons, creating text, store images or change background. Nextion display communicates with any microcontroller using serial at a 9600 baud rate.

Nextion Display Weather Station Kit Nextion display could be used together with other accessories to assemble DIY kit, for example weather station kit.

With the microcontroller and Nextion HMI display, you can easily make alightweight phone that is able to make calls, receive calls, send and also receive SMS. It uses a GSM module to connect to the mobile networkand Nextion display to visualize GUI interfaces.

Have used Nextion displays for a number of projects and love them. All you need is RX and TX links and they can be driven by any processor with RX, TX communications. They have sufficient memory to accept jpg files for graphics making coding really easy.

It appears that Itead has worldwide distribution rights (except China). I imagine that TJC aren’t happy that their 0.55 editor version improvements that would gain them extra sales are being ignored. Instead, Nextion want paying extra for what we would call ‘product support’

Whilst I can use Nextion editor and Arduino IDE, I’m not in the same league as say Iuma and hag and similar experts who know what’s going on deep down.

But I do know that the Arduino, Esp and Esp8266 have usb, serial and SPI comms so why not attach one of these processors to a standard SPI touch screen, then develop a library and GUI similar to Nextion but with added features, which could also include remote firmware updates. If the Esp was used, then that includes GPIO pins.

Costly? – I don’t think so - have priced a 3.5 inch touch screen and Esp for less than £8.00 retail. I pay about £20 for same size Nextion. Surely that would allow a manufacturer to get reasonable profit margin for a superior product.