bitmap animation arduino tft lcd free sample

Displaying a custom image or graphic on a LCD display is a very useful task as displays are now a premium way of providing feedback to users on any project. With this functionality, we can build projects that display our own logo, or display images that help users better understand a particular task the project is performing, providing an all-round improved User Experience (UX) for your Arduino or ESP8266 based project. Today’s tutorial will focus on how you can display graphics on most Arduino compatible displays.

The procedure described in this tutorial works with all color displays supported by Adafruit’s GFX library and also works for displays supported by the TFTLCD library from Adafruit with little modification. Some of the displays on which this procedure works include:

While these are the displays we have, and on which this tutorial was tested, we are confident it will work perfectly fine with most of the other Arduino compatible displays.

For each of the displays mentioned above, we have covered in past how to program and connect them to Arduino. You should check those tutorials, as they will give you the necessary background knowledge on how each of these displays works.

For this tutorial, we will use the 2.8″ ILI9325 TFT Display which offers a resolution of 320 x 340 pixels and we will display a bitmap image of a car.

To demonstrate how things work, we will use the 2.8″ TFT Display. The 2.8″ TFT display comes as a shield which plugs directly into the Arduino UNO as shown in the image below.

Not all Arduino displays are available as shields, so when working with any of them, connect the display as you would when displaying text (we recommend following the detailed tutorial for the display type you use of the above list). This means no special connection is required to display graphics.

Before an image is displayed on any of the Arduino screens, it needs to be converted to a C compatible hex file and that can only happen when the image is in bitmap form. Thus, our first task is to create a bitmap version of the graphics to be displayed or convert the existing image to a bitmap file. There are several tools that can be used for creation/conversion of bitmap images including, Corel Draw and Paint.net, but for this tutorial, we will use the Paint.net.

Your graphics could also include some text. Just ensure the background is black and the fill color is white if you plan to change the color within your Arduino code.

With the graphics done, save both files as .bmp with 24bits color.It is important to keep in mind that large bitmaps use up a lot of memory and may prevent your code from running properly so always keep the bitmaps as small as possible.

Image2Code is an easy-to-use, small Java utility to convert images into a byte array that can be used as a bitmap on displays that are compatible with the Adafruit-GFX or Adafruit TFTLCD (with little modification) library.

All we have to do is to load the graphics into the software by clicking the “Choose file” button and it will automatically generate a byte array equivalent to the selected bitmap file.

Paste the bit array in the graphics.c file and save. Since we have two graphics (the car and the text), You can paste their data array in the same file. check the graphics.c file attached to the zip file, under the download section to understand how to do this. Don’t forget to declare the data type as “const unsigned char“, add PROGEM in front of it and include the avr/pgmspace.h header file as shown in the image below.  This instructs the code to store the graphics data in the program memory of the Arduino.

With this done, we are now ready to write the code. Do note that this procedure is the same for all kind of displays and all kind of graphics. Convert the graphics to a bitmap file and use the Img2code utility to convert it into a hex file which can then be used in your Arduino code.

To reduce the amount of code, and stress involved in displaying the graphics, we will use two wonderful libraries; The GFX library and the TFTLCD library from Adafruit.

The GFX library, among several other useful functions, has a function called drawBitmap(), which enables the display of a monochrome bitmap image on the display. This function allows the upload of monochrome only (single color) graphics, but this can be overcome by changing the color of the bitmap using some code.

The Adafruit libraries do not support all of the displays but there are several modifications of the libraries on the internet for more displays. If you are unable to find a modified version of the library suitable for your the display, all you need do is copy the code of the drawBitmap() function from the GFX library and paste it in the Arduino sketch for your project such that it becomes a user-defined function.

The first two are thex and y coordinates of a point on the screen where we want the image to be displayed. The next argument is the array in which the bitmap is loaded in our code, in this case, it will be the name of the car and the text array located in the graphics.c file. The next two arguments are the width and height of the bitmap in pixels, in other words, the resolution of the image. The last argument is the color of the bitmap, we can use any color we like. The bitmap data must be located in program memory since Arduino has a limited amount of RAM memory available.

As usual, we start writing the sketch by including the libraries required. For this procedure, we will use the TFTLCD library alone, since we are assuming you are using a display that is not supported by the GFX library.

Next, we specify the name of the graphics to be displayed; car and title. At this stage, you should have added the bit array for these two bitmaps in the graphics.c file and the file should be placed in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

With that done, we proceed to the void loop function, under the loop function, we call the drawbitmap() function to display the car and the text bitmap using different colors.

The last section of the code is the drawBitmap function itself, as earlier mentioned, to use the drawbitmap() function with the Adafruit TFTLCD library, we need to copy the function’s code and paste into the Arduino sketch.

Plug in your screen as shown above. If you are using any other display, connect it as shown in the corresponding linked tutorial. With the schematics in place, connect the Arduino board to your PC and upload the code. Don’t forget the graphics file needs to be in the same folder as the Arduino sketch.

That’s it for this tutorial guys. The procedure is the same for all kinds of Arduino compatible displays. If you get stuck while trying to replicate this using any other display, feel free to reach out to me via the comment sections below.

Anyway now I commented that line, beacuse I am not interested in speed right now. But now the problem seems to be the programation code. the error message is as follows: ( I am using Arduino 1.8.7)

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:101:37: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:106:42: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:118:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:121:42: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:151:40: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:163:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:176:37: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:183:38: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:188:38: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:193:38: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:198:38: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:205:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:210:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:215:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:220:39: warning: ISO C++ forbids converting a string constant to "char*" [-Wwrite-strings]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino: In function "void drawBMP(char*, int, int, boolean)":

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:267:40: warning: converting to non-pointer type "int" from NULL [-Wconversion-null]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino: In function "void drawRAW(char*, int16_t, int16_t, int16_t, int16_t)":

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:377:40: warning: converting to non-pointer type "int" from NULL [-Wconversion-null]

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2/ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:355: undefined reference to `FatFile::close()"

C:\Users\ADMIRAL\Videos\arduino\Libraries\Adafruit_ILI9341_AS\examples\ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2/ILI9341_draw_bitmap_v2.ino:338: undefined reference to `FatFile::read(void*, unsigned int)"

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to connect the shield to the Arduino and program it using visualino to make the bitmap move on the display.

As shown in picturesTo to start programming the Arduino, insert the TFT shield into the top of the Arduino Uno, you need to install the Arduino IDE from here: Make sure to install 1. 6.

First, we will add the graphic element to draw the shadow of the text: now we will add the graphic element to draw the text: Next, we will add the graphic element to draw the bitmap: to animate the bitmap, we need to control its X and Y positions.

To do this, we will add pins for the X and Y attributes: We will animate the bitmap movement using 2 integer sine generators: to render the bitmap every time we update the X and Y positions, we need to send the clock signal to the \”draw Bitmap1\” element.

Hey guys, Nick here. welcome to educ8s.tv a channel dedicated to DIY electronics projects with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP8266 and other popular boards. In today’s Arduino tutorial, we are going to learn how to display custom bitmap graphics on most of the popular screens/displays that are compatible with the Arduino using the Adafruit GFX library and/or the Adafruit TFTLCD library.

Being able to display a personal/customized bitmap graphics on a display is a very useful functionality that Adafruit’s GFX library offers. With this functionality, we can build projects that display our own logo, or that helps users better understand a particular task the project is performing, providing an all-round improved User experience for your Arduino or ESP8266 based project.

The procedure that I am going to describe in this tutorial works with all the color displays that are supported by Adafruit’s GFX library and it also works for displays that use the TFTLCD library from Adafruit with a little modification. Some of the displays which I own on which this procedure works include the color OLED display, the 1.8” ST7735 color TFT display, the 2.8” Color Touch Screen which I reviewed a few weeks ago and the 3.5” Color TFT display. For each of the screen mentioned above, I have at one time or the other in the past cover how to connect them in an Arduino tutorial and you should check those tutorials out as it may give you a better background knowledge into how each of this displays works.

For this tutorial, we will be using the 2.8″ TFT Display which offers a resolution of 320 x 340 pixels resolution and we will display bitmap image of a car as shown in the image below.

As earlier mentioned and can be seen from the video, this procedure works with other screens which are compatible with the AdafruitGFX library or the Adafruit TFTLCD library.

Before putting the bitmap on a display we will need to create them or convert an already existing image into a bitmap image after which we will convert the bitmap image into a hex file which can then be used in our Arduino code. There are several tools which can be used for the creation of bitmap images, the likes of Corel draw and paint.net to mention a few, but for this tutorial, we will be using the paint.net software.

We can also create a text-based bitmap for the title, using any font and any language, we only need to make sure that background of the text is black and the text itself is white for easy display.

We then save both files as .bmp with 24bits color, it is important to keep in mind that large bitmaps use up a lot of memory and may prevent your code from running properly so always keep the bitmaps as small as possible.

With the graphics ready, the next task is for us to convert the graphics into bit arrays so they can be used in the code. To do this, we will be using the Image to LCD bitmap converter Java utility developed by Adafruit.

Paste the copied data array in the graphics.c file and save. Since we have two graphics for this tutorial, paste the data array for the two graphics in the file, separating them with their names. Don’t forget to declare the type of data in the data array as cont unsigned char and to add PROGEM in front of it (as shown in the image below) to store the data in the program memory of the Arduino.

As earlier mentioned, this functionality can be achieved by using the Adafruit GFX library or making a slight modification to the Adafruit TFTLCD library. so we will need these libraries for this tutorial and they can be downloaded from the link below.

The GFX library from Adafruit offers a function called drawBitmap, which enables the display of a monochrome bitmap image on the display. We can’t load multicolor graphics with this function just single color graphics but we can change the color of the bitmap image itself and thus display our graphics in different colors.  If the display you have does not support the Adafruit GFX library but supports the Adafruit TFTLCD library we will have to make a modification to the Arduino sketch which involves copying the code of the drawBitmap function from the GFX library and pasting it in our Arduino sketch so it becomes a user-defined function.

The drawBitmap function is the key ingredient to writing the code for this project and every other part of the code has been covered at one time or the other in other tutorials on this website. The drawBitmap function takes 6 arguments as shown in the code snippet below;

The first two are the x and y coordinates of a point on the screen where we want the image to be displayed. The next argument is the array in which the bitmap is loaded in our code, in this case, it will be the name of the car and the text array located in the graphics.c file. The next two arguments are the width and height of the bitmap in pixels, in other words, the resolution of the image. The last argument is the color of the bitmap, we can use any color we like. The bitmap data must be located in program memory since Arduino has a limited amount of RAM memory available. The function is used as shown in the code snippet below:

Since using the TFTLCD library to achieve the goals of this project is more complex, it’s probably better to do a full explanation of how to write the code using the procedure. Howbeit, the code for the two procedures is included in the folder under the download section.

Next, we declare the name of the graphics which will be used; car and title, at this stage, you should have added the bit array for this two bitmaps in the graphics.c file and the file should be located in the same sketch folder as this code.

Next, is the void loop function, under the loop function, we call the drawbitmap function to display the car and the text bitmap using different colors.

The last section of the code is the drawBitmap function itself, as earlier mentioned, to use the drawbitmap function with the Adafruit TFTLCD library, we need to copy the function’s code and paste into the Arduino sketch.

In this article, you will learn how to use TFT LCDs by Arduino boards. From basic commands to professional designs and technics are all explained here.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

After choosing the right display, It’s time to choose the right controller. If you want to display characters, tests, numbers and static images and the speed of display is not important, the Atmega328 Arduino boards (such as Arduino UNO) are a proper choice. If the size of your code is big, The UNO board may not be enough. You can use Arduino Mega2560 instead. And if you want to show high resolution images and motions with high speed, you should use the ARM core Arduino boards such as Arduino DUE.

In electronics/computer hardware a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a microprocessor, microcontroller, ASIC or general-purpose peripheral interface and a particular type of display device, e.g. LCD, LED, OLED, ePaper, CRT, Vacuum fluorescent or Nixie.

The LCDs manufacturers use different drivers in their products. Some of them are more popular and some of them are very unknown. To run your display easily, you should use Arduino LCDs libraries and add them to your code. Otherwise running the display may be very difficult. There are many free libraries you can find on the internet but the important point about the libraries is their compatibility with the LCD’s driver. The driver of your LCD must be known by your library. In this article, we use the Adafruit GFX library and MCUFRIEND KBV library and example codes. You can download them from the following links.

You must add the library and then upload the code. If it is the first time you run an Arduino board, don’t worry. Just follow these steps:Go to www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software of your OS. Install the IDE software as instructed.

First you should convert your image to hex code. Download the software from the following link. if you don’t want to change the settings of the software, you must invert the color of the image and make the image horizontally mirrored and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now add it to the software and convert it. Open the exported file and copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are sizes of image. you can change the color of the image in the last input.

Upload your image and download the converted file that the UTFT libraries can process. Now copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are size of the image.

In this template, We converted a .jpg image to .c file and added to the code, wrote a string and used the fade code to display. Then we used scroll code to move the screen left. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We used sin(); and cos(); functions to draw Arcs with our desired thickness and displayed number by text printing function. Then we converted an image to hex code and added them to the code and displayed the image by bitmap function. Then we used draw lines function to change the style of the image. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We added a converted image to code and then used two black and white arcs to create the pointer of volumes.  Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We added a converted image and use the arc and print function to create this gauge.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

while (a < b) { Serial.println(a); j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 255, 255)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

while (b < a) { j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 0, 0)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

In this template, We display simple images one after each other very fast by bitmap function. So you can make your animation by this trick.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We just display some images by RGBbitmap and bitmap functions. Just make a code for touchscreen and use this template.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

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.

Based on Arduino_GFX and gifdec, espgfxGIF is an Arduino sketch that plays animated GIF on TFT screen of some Arduino Dev modules, mainly esp32 and esp8266.

TFT_eSPI, which is the most common TFT graphic library, supports BMP, and MJPEG/JPEG files via drawBmp() and drawJpeg(). However, due to the way how GIF handles cmap with custom color palettes, drawGIF is not supported (as what I am aware of). Adafruit_GFX also lack support for animated GIF. Color corruption is a common issue.

Arduino_GFX is a rewritten library from Adafruit_GFX, TFT_eSPI to support various displays with various data bus interfaces. Using gifdec to fill the GIF frames into to display data bus, an animated GIF can be played on the TFT display.

Arduino_DataBus *bus = new Arduino_RPiPicoSPI(27 /* DC */, 17 /* CS */, PIN_SPI0_SCK /* SCK */, PIN_SPI0_MOSI /* MOSI */, PIN_SPI0_MISO /* MISO */, spi0 /* spi */);

I am messing around with TFT displays now and have been interested in my TFT displays bitmap function, however, it is very slow. when doing any other kind of colour printing/messages it is about as instantaneous as I"d expect, but when doing bitmaps it takes almost 30seconds to fully update the 320x480px screen.

I"m wondering if this is normal for this type of display and setup and if not then, how can I speed it up! Ideally I"d like to display simple animations!

New functions have been added to draw smooth (antialiased) arcs, circles, and rounded rectangle outlines. New sketches are provided in the "Smooth Graphics" examples folder. Arcs can be drawn with or without anti-aliasing (which will then render faster). The arc ends can be straight or rounded. The arc drawing algorithm uses an optimised fixed point sqrt() function to improve performance on processors that do not have a hardware Floating Point Unit (e.g. RP2040). Here are two demo images, on the left smooth (anti-aliased) arcs with rounded ends, the image to the right is the same resolution (grabbed from the same 240x240 TFT) with the smoothing diasbled (no anti-aliasing):

An excellent new compatible library is available which can render TrueType fonts on a TFT screen (or into a sprite). This has been developed by takkaO, I have created a branch with some bug fixes here. The library provides access to compact font files, with fully scaleable anti-aliased glyphs. Left, middle and right justified text can also be printed to the screen. I have added TFT_eSPI specific examples to the OpenFontRender library and tested on RP2040 and ESP32 processors, the ESP8266 does not have sufficient RAM due to the glyph render complexity. Here is a demo screen where a single 12kbyte font file binary was used to render fully anti-aliased glyphs of gradually increasing size on a 320x480 TFT screen:

Smooth fonts can now be rendered direct to the TFT with very little flicker for quickly changing values. This is achieved by a line-by-line and block-by-block update of the glyph area without drawing pixels twice. This is a "breaking" change for some sketches because a new true/false parameter is needed to render the background. The default is false if the parameter is missing, Examples:

Frank Boesing has created an extension library for TFT_eSPI that allows a large range of ready-built fonts to be used. Frank"s library (adapted to permit rendering in sprites as well as TFT) can be downloaded here. More than 3300 additional Fonts are available here. The TFT_eSPI_ext library contains examples that demonstrate the use of the fonts.

Users of PowerPoint experienced with running macros may be interested in the pptm sketch generator here, this converts graphics and tables drawn in PowerPoint slides into an Arduino sketch that renders the graphics on a 480x320 TFT. This is based on VB macros created by Kris Kasprzak here.

An Arduino IDE compatible graphics and fonts library for 32 bit processors. The library is targeted at 32 bit processors, it has been performance optimised for RP2040, STM32, ESP8266 and ESP32 types, other processors may be used but will use the slower generic Arduino interface calls. The library can be loaded using the Arduino IDE"s Library Manager. Direct Memory Access (DMA) can be used with the ESP32, RP2040 and STM32 processors with SPI interface displays to improve rendering performance. DMA with a parallel interface (8 and 16 bit parallel) is only supported with the RP2040.

For other processors only SPI interface displays are supported and the slower Arduino SPI library functions are used by the library. Higher clock speed processors such as used for the Teensy 3.x and 4.x boards will still provide a very good performance with the generic Arduino SPI functions.

"Four wire" SPI and 8 bit parallel interfaces are supported. Due to lack of GPIO pins the 8 bit parallel interface is NOT supported on the ESP8266. 8 bit parallel interface TFTs (e.g. UNO format mcufriend shields) can used with the STM32 Nucleo 64/144 range or the UNO format ESP32 (see below for ESP32).

The library supports some TFT displays designed for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) that are based on a ILI9486 or ST7796 driver chip with a 480 x 320 pixel screen. The ILI9486 RPi display must be of the Waveshare design and use a 16 bit serial interface based on the 74HC04, 74HC4040 and 2 x 74HC4094 logic chips. Note that due to design variations between these displays not all RPi displays will work with this library, so purchasing a RPi display of these types solely for use with this library is NOT recommended.

Some displays permit the internal TFT screen RAM to be read, a few of the examples use this feature. The TFT_Screen_Capture example allows full screens to be captured and sent to a PC, this is handy to create program documentation.

The library includes a "Sprite" class, this enables flicker free updates of complex graphics. Direct writes to the TFT with graphics functions are still available, so existing sketches do not need to be changed.

A Sprite is notionally an invisible graphics screen that is kept in the processors RAM. Graphics can be drawn into the Sprite just as they can be drawn directly to the screen. Once the Sprite is completed it can be plotted onto the screen in any position. If there is sufficient RAM then the Sprite can be the same size as the screen and used as a frame buffer. Sprites by default use 16 bit colours, the bit depth can be set to 8 bits (256 colours) , or 1 bit (any 2 colours) to reduce the RAM needed. On an ESP8266 the largest 16 bit colour Sprite that can be created is about 160x128 pixels, this consumes 40Kbytes of RAM. On an ESP32 the workspace RAM is more limited than the datasheet implies so a 16 bit colour Sprite is limited to about 200x200 pixels (~80Kbytes), an 8 bit sprite to 320x240 pixels (~76kbytes). A 1 bit per pixel Sprite requires only 9600 bytes for a full 320 x 240 screen buffer, this is ideal for supporting use with 2 colour bitmap fonts.

The "Animated_dial" example shows how dials can be created using a rotated Sprite for the needle. To run this example the TFT interface must support reading from the screen RAM (not all do). The dial rim and scale is a jpeg image, created using a paint program.

The XPT2046 touch screen controller is supported for SPI based displays only. The SPI bus for the touch controller is shared with the TFT and only an additional chip select line is needed. This support will eventually be deprecated when a suitable touch screen library is available.

The library supports SPI overlap on the ESP8266 so the TFT screen can share MOSI, MISO and SCLK pins with the program FLASH, this frees up GPIO pins for other uses. Only one SPI device can be connected to the FLASH pins and the chips select for the TFT must be on pin D3 (GPIO0).

Configuration of the library font selections, pins used to interface with the TFT and other features is made by editing the User_Setup.h file in the library folder, or by selecting your own configuration in the "User_Setup_Selet,h" file. Fonts and features can easily be enabled/disabled by commenting out lines.

It would be possible to compress the vlw font files but the rendering performance to a TFT is still good when storing the font file(s) in SPIFFS, LittleFS or FLASH arrays.

Anti-aliased fonts can also be drawn over a gradient background with a callback to fetch the background colour of each pixel. This pixel colour can be set by the gradient algorithm or by reading back the TFT screen memory (if reading the display is supported).

Unfortunately the typical UNO/mcufriend TFT display board maps LCD_RD, LCD_CS and LCD_RST signals to the ESP32 analogue pins 35, 34 and 36 which are input only. To solve this I linked in the 3 spare pins IO15, IO33 and IO32 by adding wires to the bottom of the board as follows:

If you load a new copy of TFT_eSPI then it will overwrite your setups if they are kept within the TFT_eSPI folder. One way around this is to create a new folder in your Arduino library folder called "TFT_eSPI_Setups". You then place your custom setup.h files in there. After an upgrade simply edit the User_Setup_Select.h file to point to your custom setup file e.g.:

This library enables you to use Hardware-based PWM channels on Arduino AVR ATtiny-based boards (ATtiny3217, etc.), using megaTinyCore, to create and output PWM to pins.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on Arduino AVR ATtiny-based boards (ATtiny3217, etc.), using megaTinyCore, to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

Small low-level classes and functions for Arduino: incrementMod(), decToBcd(). strcmp_PP(), PrintStr, PrintStrN, printPad{N}To(), printIntAsFloat(), TimingStats, formUrlEncode(), FCString, KString, hashDjb2(), binarySearch(), linearSearch(), isSorted(), reverse(), and so on.

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) algorithms (crc8, crc16ccitt, crc32) programmatically converted from C99 code generated by pycrc (https://pycrc.org) to Arduino C++ using namespaces and PROGMEM flash memory.

Various sorting algorithms for Arduino, including Bubble Sort, Insertion Sort, Selection Sort, Shell Sort (3 versions), Comb Sort (4 versions), Quick Sort (3 versions).

Date, time, timezone classes for Arduino supporting the full IANA TZ Database to convert epoch seconds to date and time components in different time zones.

Clock classes for Arduino that provides an auto-incrementing count of seconds since a known epoch which can be synchronized from external sources such as an NTP server, a DS3231 RTC chip, or an STM32 RTC chip.

Useful Arduino utilities which are too small as separate libraries, but complex enough to be shared among multiple projects, and often have external dependencies to other libraries.

Fast and compact software I2C implementations (SimpleWireInterface, SimpleWireFastInterface) on Arduino platforms. Also provides adapter classes to allow the use of third party I2C libraries using the same API.

Enables Bluetooth® Low Energy connectivity on the Arduino MKR WiFi 1010, Arduino UNO WiFi Rev.2, Arduino Nano 33 IoT, Arduino Nano 33 BLE and Nicla Sense ME.

Fully Asynchronous UDP Library for RASPBERRY_PI_PICO_W using CYW43439 WiFi with arduino-pico core. The library is easy to use and includes support for Unicast, Broadcast and Multicast environments.

The last hope for the desperate AVR programmer. A small (344 bytes) Arduino library to have real program traces and to find the place where your program hangs.

An Arduino library that takes input in degrees and output a string or integer for the 4, 8, 16, or 32 compass headings (like North, South, East, and West).

Directly interface Arduino, esp8266, and esp32 to DSC PowerSeries and Classic security systems for integration with home automation, remote control apps, notifications on alarm events, and emulating DSC panels to connect DSC keypads.

This library enables you to use Hardware-based PWM channels on Arduino AVRDx-based boards (AVR128Dx, AVR64Dx, AVR32Dx, etc.), using DxCore, to create and output PWM.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on Arduino AVRDx-based boards (AVR128Dx, AVR64Dx, AVR32Dx, etc.), using DxCore, to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

Small and easy to use Arduino library for using push buttons at INT0/pin2 and / or any PinChangeInterrupt pin.Functions for long and double press detection are included.Just connect buttons between ground and any pin of your Arduino - that"s itNo call of begin() or polling function like update() required. No blocking debouncing delay.

Arduino library for controlling standard LEDs in an easy way. EasyLed provides simple logical methods like led.on(), led.toggle(), led.flash(), led.isOff() and more.

OpenTherm Library to control Central Heating (CH), HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) or Solar systems by creating a thermostat using Arduino IDE and ESP32 / ESP8266 hardware.

WizFi360/ESP8266/ESP32-AT library for Arduino providing an easy-to-use way to control WizFi360/ESP8266-AT/ESP32-AT WiFi shields using AT-commands. For AVR, Teensy, SAM DUE, SAMD21, SAMD51, STM32, nRF52, SIPEED_MAIX_DUINO and RP2040-based (Nano_RP2040_Connect, RASPBERRY_PI_PICO, etc.) boards using WizFi360/ESP8266/ESP32 AT-command shields.

ezTime - pronounced "Easy Time" - is a very easy to use Arduino time and date library that provides NTP network time lookups, extensive timezone support, formatted time and date strings, user events, millisecond precision and more.

A library for implementing fixed-point in-place Fast Fourier Transform on Arduino. It sacrifices precision and instead it is way faster than floating-point implementations.

The GCodeParser library is a lightweight G-Code parser for the Arduino using only a single character buffer to first collect a line of code (also called a "block") from a serial or file input and then parse that line into a code block and comments.

Arduino library for the Flysky/Turnigy RC iBUS protocol - servo (receive) and sensors/telemetry (send) using hardware UART (AVR, ESP32 and STM32 architectures)

An Arduino library to control the Iowa Scaled Engineering I2C-IRSENSE ( https://www.iascaled.com/store/I2C-IRSENSE ) reflective infrared proximity sensor.

Convinient way to map a push-button to a keyboard key. This library utilize the ability of 32u4-based Arduino-compatible boards to emulate USB-keyboard.

This library allows you to easily create light animations from an Arduino board or an ATtiny microcontroller (traffic lights, chaser, shopkeeper sign, etc.)

LiquidCrystal fork for displays based on HD44780. Uses the IOAbstraction library to work with i2c, PCF8574, MCP23017, Shift registers, Arduino pins and ports interchangably.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on RP2040-based boards, such as Nano_RP2040_Connect, RASPBERRY_PI_PICO, with Arduino-mbed (mbed_nano or mbed_rp2040) core to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

Arduino library for MCP4728 quad channel, 12-bit voltage output Digital-to-Analog Convertor with non-volatile memory and I2C compatible Serial Interface

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on an Arduino megaAVR board, such as UNO WiFi Rev2, AVR_Nano_Every, etc., to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

Replace Arduino methods with mocked versions and let you develop code without the hardware. Run parallel hardware and system development for greater efficiency.

A library package for ARDUINO acting as ModBus slave communicating through UART-to-RS485 converter. Originally written by Geabong github user. Improved by Łukasz Ślusarczyk.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on an nRF52-based board using Arduino-mbed mbed_nano core such as Nano-33-BLE to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on an nRF52-based board using Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino core such as Itsy-Bitsy nRF52840 to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

An Arduino library for the Nano 33 BLE Sense that leverages Mbed OS to automatically place sensor measurements in a ring buffer that can be integrated into programs in a simple manner.

his library enables you to use Hardware-based PWM channels on RP2040-based boards, such as Nano_RP2040_Connect, RASPBERRY_PI_PICO, with either Arduino-mbed (mbed_nano or mbed_rp2040) or arduino-pico core to create and output PWM to any GPIO pin.

This library enables you to use SPI SD cards with RP2040-based boards such as Nano_RP2040_Connect, RASPBERRY_PI_PICO using either RP2040 Arduino-mbed or arduino-pico core.

This library enables you to use ISR-based PWM channels on RP2040-based boards, such as ADAFRUIT_FEATHER_RP2040, RASPBERRY_PI_PICO, etc., with arduino-pico core to create and output PWM any GPIO pin.

The most powerful and popular available library for using 7/14/16 segment display, supporting daisy chaining so you can control mass amounts from your Arduino!

Provides methods to retrieve instant and peak values from the ADC input. The Arduino library SensorWLED splits the input from a varying analog signal from the ADC into components, i.e., provides the capability of a sample-and-hold circuit.

Enables smooth servo movement. Linear as well as other (Cubic, Circular, Bounce, etc.) ease movements for servos are provided. The Arduino Servo library or PCA9685 servo expanders are supported.

Enables reading and writing on SD card using SD card slot connected to the SDIO/SDMMC-hardware of the STM32 MCU. For slots connected to SPI-hardware use the standard Arduino SD library.

Menu library for Arduino with IoT capabilities that supports many input and display devices with a designer UI, code generator, CLI, and strong remote control capability.

Adds tcUnicode UTF-8 support to Adafruit_GFX, U8G2, tcMenu, and TFT_eSPI graphics libraries with a graphical font creation utility available. Works with existing libraries

A library for creating Tickers which can call repeating functions. Replaces delay() with non-blocking functions. Recommanded for ESP and Arduino boards with mbed behind.

This library enables you to use Interrupt from Hardware Timers on an Arduino, Adafruit or Sparkfun AVR board, such as Nano, UNO, Mega, Leonardo, YUN, Teensy, Feather_32u4, Feather_328P, Pro Micro, etc.

This library enables you to use Interrupt from Hardware Timers on supported Arduino boards such as AVR, Mega-AVR, ESP8266, ESP32, SAMD, SAM DUE, nRF52, STM32F/L/H/G/WB/MP1, Teensy, Nano-33-BLE, RP2040-based boards, etc.

A simple library to display numbers, text and animation on 4 and 6 digit 7-segment TM1637 based display modules. Offers non-blocking animations and scrolling!

Really tiny library to basic RTC functionality on Arduino. DS1307, DS3231 and DS3232 RTCs are supported. See https://github.com/Naguissa/uEEPROMLib for EEPROM support. Temperature, Alarms, SQWG, Power lost and RAM support.

Monochrome LCD, OLED and eInk Library. Display controller: SSD1305, SSD1306, SSD1309, SSD1312, SSD1316, SSD1318, SSD1320, SSD1322, SSD1325, SSD1327, SSD1329, SSD1606, SSD1607, SH1106, SH1107, SH1108, SH1122, T6963, RA8835, LC7981, PCD8544, PCF8812, HX1230, UC1601, UC1604, UC1608, UC1610, UC1611, UC1617, UC1638, UC1701, ST7511, ST7528, ST7565, ST7567, ST7571, ST7586, ST7588, ST75160, ST75256, ST75320, NT7534, ST7920, IST3020, IST3088, IST7920, LD7032, KS0108, KS0713, HD44102, T7932, SED1520, SBN1661, IL3820, MAX7219, GP1287, GP1247, GU800. Interfaces: I2C, SPI, Parallel.

True color TFT and OLED library, Up to 18 Bit color depth. Supported display controller: ST7735, ILI9163, ILI9325, ILI9341, ILI9486,LD50T6160, PCF8833, SEPS225, SSD1331, SSD1351, HX8352C.

RFC6455-based WebSockets Server and Client for Arduino boards, such as nRF52, Portenta_H7, SAMD21, SAMD51, STM32F/L/H/G/WB/MP1, Teensy, SAM DUE, RP2040-based boards, besides ESP8266/ESP32 (ESP32, ESP32_S2, ESP32_S3 and ESP32_C3) and WT32_ETH01. Ethernet shields W5100, W5200, W5500, ENC28J60, Teensy 4.1 NativeEthernet/QNEthernet or Portenta_H7 WiFi/Ethernet. Supporting websocket only mode for Socket.IO. Ethernet_Generic library is used as default for W5x00. Now supporting RP2040W

Enables network connection (local and Internet) and WiFiStorage for SAM DUE, SAMD21, SAMD51, Teensy, AVR (328P, 32u4, 16u4, etc.), Mega, STM32F/L/H/G/WB/MP1, nRF52, NINA_B302_ublox, NINA_B112_ublox, RP2040-based boards, etc. in addition to Arduino MKR WiFi 1010, Arduino MKR VIDOR 4000, Arduino UNO WiFi Rev.2, Nano 33 IoT, Nano RP2040 Connect. Now with fix of severe limitation to permit sending much larger data than total 4K and using new WiFi101_Generic library

Universal Timer with 1 millisecond resolution, based on system uptime (i.e. Arduino: millis() function or STM32: HAL_GetTick() function), supporting OOP principles.

Stop-motion animation is the reverse process of freezing motion: such an animation is produced by displaying successive picture frames at high speed. Here we bring back to life Muybridges’ Sallie Gardner with the aid of a microcontroller connected to a suitable display. Several displays were tested with the ‘Sallie Gardner’ sketch running on an Arduino Uno, Nano or a Wemos D1 mini with an ESP8266 microprocessor chip.

Arduinos are designed to microprocess: they receive data, calculate, and communicate. Output through a display is limited since Arduinos lack a graphical processor. All the hard work in a common Arduino (Uno, Nano) is performed by a single 8-bit processor (ATmega 328) that has limited memory: 1kB EEPROM, 2kB SRAM (‘dynamic memory’) and 32kB flash memory (‘program memory’).

Programs are loaded in program memory while variables are created and during runtime stored in dynamic memory. Users have to live with the dynamic and program memory constraints offered by a common Arduino, or they can switch to an Arduino ‘Mega’ with an ATmega2560 microprocessor (256 kB flash and 8kB SRAM). One jump higher on the ladder is the family of ESP8266 based microboards, e.g., the Wemos D1 mini: 4 MB of SRAM and 50 kB of flash memory.

The challenge in the current project was to achieve fluent stop-motion animation featuring Sallie Gardner, using a humble Arduino Nano, and to see how well the animation performs with several displays. For this purpose I had available a 128*64 pixel LCD display with ST7920 controller, a 128*64 hybrid OLED display with SSD1306 controller, a 130*130 SSD TFT screen with 1283A controller, a 240*240 pixel TFT display powered by a SSD1283A chip, and several larger Arduino compatible TFT displays driven by ILI controllers

Our LCD display limits images to 128×64 pixels. The original ‘The Horse in Motion’ picture is an eight-bit gray scale jpg file from which we have to cut out frames to produce the animation bitmaps. Each cut-out frame produces a file with a size of 19 kB. Eleven of these files take 198 kB which is far beyond the amount of memory available in program space of an Arduino Nano. One solution for this is to load the files one after another from sd card, but the time consumed by this process would produce a slide show rather than the illusion of motion. A better solution is to load image frames from a separate .cpp file that needs to reside in the same directory as the sketch. The third approach, used in this paper, is to include the images in the sketch. One way or another, we need to reduce the image frames for our stop-motion animation to dimensions of 128×64 pixels or less to fit the screen.

A major consideration is that LCDs and OLEDs typically work with pixels that are either ON or OFF, that is, these devices require one-bit images: black / white. One-bit images are also called ‘monochrome’.

The combination all these considerations leads to the need to cut Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ photograph down to eleven 1-bit frames each 128 pixels wide and 64 pixels high. Smaller frames are allowed; an advantage of smaller frames is faster loading in the LCD and, for that matter, a smoother animation.

figure 2. Direct bitmap conversion from 8-bit gray level to 1-bit (monochrome) wherein the final image is a 96×64 pixel image. The conversion produces ‘dithering’ which as a ‘spray’ of black pixels mimics grey shades.

The ‘The Horse in Motion’ photograph as I acquired it from wikipedia is a grayscale, eight-bit JPG formatted file*. If we cut a frame, say Sallie Gardner nr. 11, out of the original picture with for instance Photoshop or The Gimp and reduce it to a size that fits a 128*64 screen we can subsequently export the image in monochrome bitmap format. Here, export filters dither grey tones, that is, they produces speckles sprayed in the image to sort of mimic grey shades (figure 2). The amount of dithering can be reduced by enhancing contrast and intensity of the original cut before applying the export filter. In most cases the monochrome image files need some retouch step to remove traces of dithering. The preferred format of the output image files is Microsoft bmp. Note that these monochrome images are not nicely scalable, that is, if one attempts to do that the horse becomes a stack of big black squares. Anti-aliasing can not be applied to monochrome images.

figure 3. Import of a cut-out frame (nr. 11) of the original picture in a vector program is followed by manual segmentation (upper right; red contour). Subsequent deletion of the original bitmap produces a vector contour that can be scaled indefinitely without loss of sharpness. This vector image can then be exported to 1-bit monochrome bmp image format. If your vector drawing programs doesn’t have a monochrome bitmap export filter you will need extra software to convert the export file into proper monochrome bmp.

figure 4. Illustration of the vector procedure. Upper part: closed contour drawings of the horse and its rider are prepared in the vector drawing program as overlay for each frame of Muybridge’s original photograph. Lower part: the underlying bitmap is deleted, a 2:1 proportion frame added and export to 1-bit bitmap files can start. Note that a big advantage of vector images (the contour drawings) is that they remain scalable without loss of quality.

9. Scale the entire stack such that animation frame bitmaps, when exported, satisfy the conditions for LCD display: maximum width 128 pixels, maximum height 64 pixels. In the case of Sallie Gardner the scaling was conducted such that exported animation frame images measured 96×64 pixels, that is: height is here the limiting factor for the Sallie Gardner animation frames.

An intermediate, monitoring step is to check with an animated GIF creating program whether all export actions have been executed correctly and indeed have produced the 1-bit monochrome bitmaps that we need for the animation. I use Fiji (ImageJ) for this purpose. Fiji is a wonderful, free, open source cross platform imaging suite built on a Java platform (https://imagej.net/Fiji). One can also check with an animated GIF how fluid the movements in the Arduino animation will be. Small corrections can at this point be made in the vector file to get the very best out of the animation.

While Arduinos can work with bitmap files loaded from sd card, the loading and processing from sd card is is not fast enough to support animation. The monochrome images that we have produced need to be embedded in the sketch in 8-bit hexadecimal code (so-called ‘c-array’), or as ‘extern’ in the sketch folder

Conversion from bitmap to hexadecimal code is done with the program lcd-image-converter (freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/lcd-image-converter/). There exist also on line conversion tools.

Output of lcd-image-converter is a c-array file that, because it is in plain ascii text format, can be opened in any ascii editor (Notepad, Notepad++, Gedit) (figure 5).

The c-array starts with a variable: static const uint8_t, followed by the image’s file name and size (between the brackets). File size of each c-array is 768 bytes which will result in an animation that has 11×768 bytes = 8,448 bytes. With an Arduino Uno or Nano these c-arrays must be placed in program memory because the dynamic memory can hold only 2 kB of information.

figure 5. C-array file opened with an ascii editor (gedit). Frame 0. Left column: the entire c-array file listed. C-array files are composed as follows: top section: array information (commented), middle section: visual output (commented). All you need is in fact to copy-paste the bottom section: hex code array (pink) into the Arduino sketch.

If an array is defined in a sketch it will by default be compiled by the Arduino IDE to run in dynamic memory. As shown above, each frame of our animation requires 768 bytes. All the c-arrays must be placed in in program memory as constant unsigned chars. To achieve this the library is required, and we must redefine each array. For frame horse_00 the c-array the redefinition is the following:

The stop-motion was initially developed on a 128*64 LCD, just out of curiosity to know in the first place whether it was possible to create an animation on technology so limited in graphic display. The library available to work with the 128*64LCD is by Olikraus. As can be seen in the basic sketch below, void setup(void) is empty. All action is in void draw(void).

The complete sketch for the 128*64 ST7920 LCD wired to an Arduino Nano is supplied at the end of this document. You will find also versions of the sketch compatible with different display / microprocessor combinations. All these sketches contain the hexadecimal c-array description for each frame. I have added for each frame in a series of commented lines of empty and black characters a visual impression of how the frame looks like.

From the beginning it was evident that frame nr. 11 of “The Horse in Motion” would not contribute to a fluent animation. I assumed that each of the other frames would smoothly transfer to the next and that each animation cycle of frames would smoothly overflow into the next. However, the prototype sketch running on an Arduino Nano that powers a 128*64 LCD with ST7920 controller (figure 6), hiccuped at the point where it cycles from the last frame to the first. The cause appeared to be frame nr. 0 that seems to be atypical. Maybe this frame has been included by Muybridge to produce an appealing 4×3 photomontage. Who knows. Anyway, after frame nr 0 was excluded a very smoothly running animation remained. At this point I decided to include only frames 1 through 10 in the final animation. After completion of the prototyping work the ‘production’ sketch was adapted to run on a variety of combinations of microprocessor boards and displays at hand. A selection of the tested displays is shown in figure 6 while the table below provides the essentials of the tested devices.

Running the animation on the 128*64 LCD requires reference to the library by Olikraus in the sketch to accommodate the displays’ ST7920 controller. To my surprise the animation ran so fast on the LCD that 10 ms delays had to be introduced in between frames to limit Sallie Gardner’’s gallop to a realistic, say ‘horse-friendly’ pace. On the other hand, the LCD suffers from ‘motion blur’ due to the slow response time of the individual liquid crystal pixels. This results in a sort of ‘anti-aliasing’ effect.

Also on the 128*64 OLED with the SSD1306 controller the horse gallops fast and friendly under the library. Here the response time of individual pixels is very short compared with classical LCD: there is no motion blur compared with the 128*64 LCD.

The 130*130 TFT display has a SSD1283A controller that needs the and the LCDWIKI_SPI.h> libraries for compilation. On this display the animation runs smoothly and briskly when the frames are printed to TFT as fast as possible, with no delay () instruction in between successive frames. A delay up to 10 ms is acceptable.

Equestrian performance on the 130*130 TFT display connected to a Wemos D1 Mini did not produce faster animation than with a Nano as engine. In sketches written for the Wemos D1 Mini one is free to use the PROGMEM instruction. This microprocessor board has plenty SRAM available for the animation job. If PROGMEM was left out and all frame arrays were loaded as variables in dynamic memory instead of program memory, one might expect a faster animation. This however did not materialize: the speed of the animation did not change.

On the TFT display with more pixels (240*240-ST7789) the results were disappointing. Screen updates between every frame that sweep the entire screen instead of the 128×64 pixel ‘Sallie Gardner’ were markedly visible. On the 2.4, 2.8, 3.5 and 3.95 inch 240×320 and 320×480 pixel TFT displays (shields) with ILI controllers, including the 3.95 inch 320×480 ILI6814 screen, animation speed was grandiose, thanks to the support of David Prentice’s library of screen-in-screen display.

figure 6. Animation played on several displays in combination with either Arduino Uno or Nano, or with a Wemos D1 Mini. While all these images measure 96 pixels in width and 64 pixels in height the size of their appearance is different because of pixel dimensions in these displays. The speed of the animation differs sharply between displays depending on the ‘efficiency’ of the library included in the sketch. The head of the jockey on the OLED is yellow because this display is of the hybrid, blue-yellow type.

The 128*64 LCD is a relatively big display with in proportion big LCD pixels. The OLED, 130*130 TFT and 240*240 TFT are devices with one-inch diagonal screens where the 240*240 TFT stands out with minuscule pixels that provide extreme sharpness. Sallie Gardner will certainly win a horse race on 320*480 TFT screens with my sketches compared with the LCD, OLED and small TFTs. The secret here is that on the TFT displays running under the library functionality only the 96×64 pixel screen-in-screen is redrawn in between each frame. This is very economical. In these screen-in-screens pixels are directly printed to screen from the c-array, thanks to an ‘engine’ written by David Prentice. This screen-inscreen way of animation would be a big improvement if also available for the 240*240 TFT display.

Searching the internet for other Muybridge horse animations for the Arduino I encountered in the Arduino forum a sketch for the Adafruit 128*64 OLED created in 2016 by Greg Stievenart and featuring ‘Annie G’, another galloping race horse, from Muybridge’s book “Animal Locomotion” (1887), plate 626; Muybridge has published hundreds of montage pictures of all kinds of animals and humans in motion; Sallie Gardner was only the premiere of his gigantic oevre. See https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=375985.0. Greg uses the method wherein the c-arrays are separate, external files. This works fine.

Most of the work to produce an animation is invested in the preparation of the frames. The limitations as far as Arduinos concerned are display size, c-array size, available memory in the microprocessor board, number and size of the frames, display controller speed and, finally, the efficiency of the library that contains the graphical and bitmap functions that govern printing each c-array to the display. Quite a handful of constraints! This makes it the more challenging and simultaneously more fun to continue working with small microprocessor boards. An animation is a chain of events in which the slowest link determines the outcome, that is a smooth and elegant animation.

As I had mentioned in one of my prior posts, I had been using Paul Stoffregen’s ILI9341_t3 library to drive data on the TFT display, and for the purposes of static information (pictures, text, whatever) it was more than sufficient. However, animation of these elements would prove to be a significant obstacle. The basic idea about how these screens work is that you push information to them and they stay in that state until something overwrites them. A basic instance is a single pixel – you can tell it to display a red color, and it will do so indefinitely so long as the device remains powered and it does not receive any subsequent data to change that specific pixel to a different color. However, this means that any region that might be subject to animation is essentially a three-step process:Draw the initial graphical element;

If you have the memory for it, you can basically create a ‘frame buffer’, or memory construct tha