bitmap animation arduino tft lcd in stock

ILI9341 based TFT Touchscreen Display Shields are very popular low cost Display Shields for Arduino. Visuino has had support for them for quite a while, but I never had chance to write a Tutorial on how to use them. Recently however few people asked questions about using displays with Visuino, so I decided to make a tutorial.

In this Tutorial, I will show you how easy it is, to connect the Shield to Arduino, and program it with Visuino to animate a Bitmap to move around on the Display.

In the "Shields" dialog expand the "Displays" category, and select the "TFT Color Touch Screen Display ILI9341 Shield", then click on the "+" button to add it (Picture 2)

Next we need to add Graphics elements to render text and bitmap. First we will add graphics element to draw the shadow of the text:In the Object Inspector, click on the "..." button next to the value of the "Elements" property of the "TFT Display" Element (Picture 1)

Next we will add graphics element to draw the bitmap:In the Elements editor select “Draw Bitmap”, and then click on the "+" button (Picture 1) to add one (Picture 2)

In the Object Inspector, click on the "..." button next to the value of the "Bitmap" property of the "Draw Bitmap1" Element (Picture 2) to open the "Bitmap Editor" (Picture 3)

In the File Open Dialog, select the bitmap to draw, and click on the "Open" button (Picture 4). If the file is too big it may not be able to fit in the Arduino memory. If you get out of memory error during the compilation, you may need to select a smaller bitmap

To animate the Bitmap, we need to control its X and Y position. For this we will add pins for the X and Y properties:In the Object Inspector click on the "Pin" button at front of the "X" property of the "Draw Bitmap1" element (Picture 1), and select "Integer SinkPin" (Picture 2)

In the Object Inspector click on the "Pin" button at front of the "Y" property of the "Draw Bitmap1" element (Picture 3), and select "Integer SinkPin" (Picture 4)

We will use 2 Integer sine generators to animate the bitmap movement:Type "sine" in the Filter box of the Component Toolbox then select the "Sine Integer Generator" component (Picture 1), and drop two of them it in the design area

Add TipAsk QuestionCommentDownloadStep 9: In Visuino: Configure the Second Sine Generator, and Connect the Sine Generators to the X and Y Coordinate Pins of the Bitmap

Connect the "Out" output pin of the SineIntegerGenerator1component to the "X" input pin of the "Shields.TFT Sisplay.Elements.Draw Bitmap1" element of the Arduino component (Picture 4)

Connect the "Out" output pin of the SineIntegerGenerator2component to the "Y" input pin of the "Shields.TFT Display.Elements.Draw Bitmap1" element of the Arduino component (Picture 5)

To render the bitmap every time the X and Y position are updated we need to send a clock signal to the "Draw Bitmap1" element. To send the command after the positions have been changed, we need a way to synchronize the events. For this we will use Repeat component to constantly generate events, and Clock Multi Source to generate 2 events in sequence. The first event will clock the sine generators to update the X and Y positions, and the second will clock the "Draw Bitmap1" :Type "repeat" in the Filter box of the Component Toolbox, then select the "Repeat" component (Picture 1), and drop it in the design area (Picture 2)

Connect the "Pin[ 1 ]" output pin of the "Clock" input pin of the "Shields.TFT Display.Elements.Draw Bitmap1" element of the Arduino component (Picture 6)

Pictures 2, 3, 4 and 5 and the Video show the connected and powered up project. You will see the Bitmap moving around the ILI9341 based TFT Touchscreen Display Shield as seen on the Video.

Also attached is the Visuino project, that I created for this Instructable, and the bitmap with the Visuino logo. You can download and open it in Visuino: https://www.visuino.com

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.

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.

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.

With a 24-bit bmp on the micro sd card, the sketch loads the image fine. According to what I have read about the LCD shield I am using, the shield loads 24-bit images from the sd card and converts it to 16-bit before putting it on the screen. I was wondering if it is possible to skip that step, have the images already in 16-bit on the sd card, and have the sketch load the 16-bit files.

Edit. I am fascinated by the "colours" in your bitmap. On my display, it really looks just like BLACK or WHITE. e.g. 0xef5dffff is going to look almost WHITE for both pixels. 0x00002965 will look BLACK for the first pixel (hi),

I have downloaded the UTFT libraries from here but the bitmap demo sketch asks for a different set of pins and doesn"t conform to any I try, I just get a white screen.

The program asks me to alter the pins to suit but there seems to be no similarity between the pins of the top sketch that works with XP = 6, XM = A2, YP = A1, YM = 7 and the bottom sketch UTFT myGLCD(ITDB32S,A5,A4,A3,A2);

By the way, it"s this LCD. But I don"t want to use it for my project, it was just for testing purposes. SPI speed seems to be limited @40MHz, but maybe shorter connections would solve this. Refresh needs 25ms.

I have received one ER-TFTM035-6 16 bit parallel with shield, and one 3.5" MCUfriend 8 bit parallel. They are both working now, using UTFT and MCUFRIEND_kvb. But I had a major issue with the ER-TFTM036-6. The shield does not match the schematics that is posted on its BuyDisplay page:

ER-TFTM032-3-4123 is 3.2 inch tft lcd display with adaptor board,ILI9341 arduino shield,examples,library.Optional touch panel,arduino mega2560,due or uno board.

New question Q6) In the example Font_simple.ino in MCUfriend_kvb, it says tft.setTextColor(RED, GREY); will provide a background to the text. And it works in the example. But when I copy the code to my sketch, there is no background and the text is transparent.

The goal i"m planning to achieve is to create a nice, fluent animation on 2.2" 320x240 TFT display (ILI9341 driver with SD card slot on the back). The animation will take place in couple of places on the screen only - not full screen. Do you know how to do it? I was thinking about the following approach:

in Arduino sketch create time efficient draw "32x40" function to pull 32x40 pixels size part of the 32x400 array starting at any row. Thus by passing any row number from "row 0" to "row last" to the "draw 32x40" function i should achieve nice and fluent animation on the screen and just repeating the draw32x40 function in loop, changing row number only i can chould see nice animation in the loop on the display - like the one in old style milage counters in cars. This is the effect i want to achieve.

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.