stm32f429 discovery tft lcd quotation

Ahh yeah look at that! If you look closely, top right of the LCD, that’s obviously a flex connector for a resistive touch overlay (4 contacts running to the 4 sides of the LCD overlay).

Agreed! I will be picking one up. I’ve been happy developing for the stm32f4discovery (and other stm32 chips) with gcc, openocd and gdb. It is all free.

A fair number of inexpensive baseboards/motherboards/accessories have also appeared for earlier versions. I hope Olimex puts out a couple nice STM32F429/427 boards.

I can see there is only a STLINK usb connector on board, so there is even no FS to expect. beside HS, I suppose does mean High Speed (480mbps). but HS anyway needs a separate physical layer USB chip for addition to STM32F4 chip and most likely this is chip is not present on this board anyway, because this is STM32F4+LCD+SDRAM demoboard and there is no need for USB at all.

I think Farnell’s 21€ will be accurate, as ST’s suggested USD price is $24. The placeholders for the STM32F429I-DISCO on element14 (a division of Farnell) and mouser show $42, which I think predates the later ST announcement. I think the ST announced $24 will hold, and the distributor prices will match that, as they have in the past.

I wouldn’t expect TI to hack profits from their calculator range, and HP have always been expensive, but ST could easily change their format to calculator-friendly. Clamshell design, LCD & battery in top half, CPU & keypad in bottom half, expansion pins to left / right of keypad makes a self contained unit.

HP Palm – Love the idea, hate the baguette (french bread loaf) layout. If I could get custom key covers, and surface-mount key switches, I’d be designing my own low-profile keypad to go with an LCD module. Top side keypad, bottom side CPU / RAM / USB / LCD driver / power regulation / expansion port.

Great find, thanks! Man, could they have buried the details on that guy any farther down into the document? I can’t help but feel like a quick pointer in the LCD section to “oh by the way there’s a touch screen, here’s how to talk to it” would have been a good idea.

It’s certainly useable in any other project where you have an onboard LCD controller. Especially any other project that happens to use a STM32F4. What difference would it have made if it had an external controller? Surely it’d have been on the same PCB. Were you hoping for a removeable SPI-interfaced module?

Look in the UM1670 user manual, paragraph 4.8: the tft includes an ILI9341 controller. The ILI9341 has it’s own graphics ram inside, it is not mapped into the STM32 address space. It is connected to the STM32 via a parallel bus. The ILI9341 and similar controllers are common on cheap chinese tfts. So it is no problem to source similar tfts for your final product after developing on the discovery board.

UM1670 in paragraph 4.8 also says that “The TFT LCD is a 2.41″ display of 262 K colors. Its definition is QVGA (240 x 320 dots) and is directly driven by the STM32F429ZIT6 using the RGB protocol”. ILI9341 has multiple modes of operation including direct RGB/HSYNC/VSYNC mode which bypasses internal GRAM. I don’t have the board yet but I assume display buffer is located in external SDRAM which is also on the board. The whole point of this kit is to show TFT and SDRAM interface in new STM32F4x9.

I’ve checked this discovery board firmware available from ST’s site (“STM32F429 discovery firmware package UM1662” number: STSW-STM32138, btw. finding it is a bit difficult – ST’s site is terrible):

Check again martin. Those lines have pullups to vdd and are connected to cpu pins. I have this board for some time and I can confirm that lcd is driven by lcd controller from cpu and frame buffer is in external dram which is also on the board.

so im trying to make a frequency counter with a nucleoSTM32F429zi and i have a few issuse firstly im using a PWM output through a low pass filter to make a sine wave. that works fine however at the end of the project i have to desplay the frequance on an LCD this is where my problems i have an LCD connected properly. but when the PWM is active there is no output to either putty or the LCD i am also unable to send anymore than a single character at a time and i need a string to show the frequancy. please advise me on what is wrong

The STM32 LTDC has a peripheral called LTDC LCD TFT Display Controllerwhichprovides a digital parallel interface(DPI) for a variety of LCD and TFT panels. It sends RGB data in parallel to the display and generates signals for horizontal and vertical synchronization (HSYNC, VSYNC), as well as pixel clock (PCLK) and not data enable (DE) signals:

In this example I use the display on the STM32F429-Discovery board, which is driven by the ILI9341 display controller. The ILI9341 can drive a QVGA (Quarter VGA) 240×320 262,144 colors LCD display. The controller can be configured via SPI (or parallel interface, depending on the panel settings) to use a digital parallel 18 bit RGB interface (since only 6 lines per color channel are wired on the board to the LTDC). Since the display pixel format is less than 8 bit per channel (RGB666 in this case), the RGB display data lines are connected to the most significant bits of the LTDC controller RGB data lines:

Before enabling the LTDC we must configure the clock system. The LTDC uses a specific clock LCD_CLOCK to generate the pixel clock signal and it must be configured and enabled during the system initialization phase:

To display an image we must convert an image file to an array (possibly a const one, so it can be stored in flash memory) of bytes. To do this I used LCD image converter, a simple but powerful application that can convert a file to a variety of different pixel formats:

In this example the framebuffers have a RGB888 color depth and for a 240×320 display that makes 225 KiB of memory for each buffer (3 bytes per pixel x 240 x 320 pixels) so they must be stored in external SRAM (the STM32F429I-DISCOVERY has a 64Mbit external SRAM so we’re good). The FMC Flexible Memory Controller has to be initialized and the address of the two frame buffers has to be configured. Drawing on the framebuffer is a matter of writing the right bytes in order to change the color. Once all pixels are drawn (bytes are written) the buffers are switched and the code can draw the next frame:

STM32F429 has also LTDC driver for LCD like that, but this driver we will use later. For now we will use SPI for driving in serial mode and some other pins for controlling.

Remember: This library can also be used, if you are not using STM32F429 Discovery. It can be used in previous STM32F4 Discovery board. All pins can be changed in defines.h file which is included in project.

First of all, the initialization sequence: each TFT panel has its own specific settings, so my best bet was to copy the init sequence from the Cube BSP, as many of the values were quite off (e.g. the VCOMs).

The STM32F429I Discovery kit is part of the range of STM32 microcontroller discovery boards that provide a comprehensive and cost effective solution for the evaluation of the outstanding abilities of the STM32F429ZIT6 MCU. The board leverages the capabilities of the STM32F429 high-performance microcontroller, to allow users to easily develop rich applications with advanced Graphic User interfaces.

The STM32F769I microcontroller features 2Mbytes of Flash memory and 256Kbytes of RAM. Additional features include a 2.4in QVGA TFT LCD, 64Mbit SDRAM, 3-axis MEMS motion sensor digital output gyroscope, 6x LEDs for function and operation indication, user and reset pushbuttons, extension header for quick connection and easy probing, and a wide range of input and output connectors.