arduino 3.5 tft lcd shield code made in china

The 3.5inch TFT LCD Module is based on ILI9481 LCD driver that includes Micro SD slot. This module gives nice picture quality and works well with Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega controllers. This kind of module is not a touch screen display. No...

This module is a 3.5-inch TFT LCD module with “320X480” resolution and 65K color display. It is suitable for Arduino Uno and Mega2560 development boards, and also supports SD card expansion function. It uses 8-bit parallel port communication, and the driver IC is ILI9486.

The 3.5-inch display is a ready-made shield for Arduino Uno, which can also be placed on the Arduino Mega. The pins of this shield are designed to be easily installed on the Arduino. The bad point about these modules is that they use all Arduino Uno pins.

my_lcd.Fill_Triangle(x_spec+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(i+1)*h_len-1,x_spec+side_len/2+i*side_len-1,y_spec+i*h_len-1,x_spec+(i+1)*side_len-1,y_spec+(i+1)*h_len-1);

my_lcd.Fill_Triangle(x_spec+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(5-i)*h_len-1,x_spec+side_len/2+i*side_len-1,y_spec+(4-i)*h_len-1,x_spec+(i+1)*side_len-1,y_spec+(5-i)*h_len-1);

my_lcd.Draw_Line(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Draw_Rectangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Draw_Round_Rectangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),5);

my_lcd.Draw_Triangle(2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34),2+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()-4),17+random(my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()-34));

my_lcd.Fill_Round_Rectangle(my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()/2-1-120+1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()/2-1-60+1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Width()/2-1+120-1, my_lcd.Get_Display_Height()/2-1+60-1,5);

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (3.5" diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 320x480 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional resistive touch panel with controller XPT2046 attached by default and a optional capacitive touch panel with controller FT6236 attached by default, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen and doesn"t require pressing down on the screen with a stylus and has nice glossy glass cover.

The pin32 (SDO) of 3.5 display module is also used by touch panel or SD card SPI interface, so we must cut off this pin to avoid conflict with the touch panel or SD card.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (Due/Mega 2560).

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. We also have a touch screen library that detects x,y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

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.

As the code is a bit longer and for better understanding I will post the source code of the program in sections with description for each section. And at the end of this article I will post the complete source 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.

Ok next is the RGB LED Control example. If we press the second button, the drawLedControl() custom function will be called only once for drawing the graphic of that example and the setLedColor() custom function will be repeatedly called. In this function we use the touch screen to set the values of the 3 sliders from 0 to 255. With the if statements we confine the area of each slider and get the X value of the slider. So the values of the X coordinate of each slider are from 38 to 310 pixels and we need to map these values into values from 0 to 255 which will be used as a PWM signal for lighting up the LED. If you need more details how the RGB LED works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. The rest of the code in this custom function is for drawing the sliders. Back in the loop section we only have the back button which also turns off the LED when pressed.

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:

No! For about the price of a familiar 2x16 LCD, you get a high resolution TFT display. For as low as $4 (shipping included!), it"s possible to buy a small, sharp TFT screen that can be interfaced with an Arduino. Moreover, it can display not just text, but elaborate graphics. These have been manufactured in the tens of millions for cell phones and other gadgets and devices, and that is the reason they are so cheap now. This makes it feasible to reuse them to give our electronic projects colorful graphic displays.

There are quite a number of small cheap TFT displays available on eBay and elsewhere. But, how is it possible to determine which ones will work with an Arduino? And what then? Here is the procedure:ID the display. With luck, it will have identifying information printed on it. Otherwise, it may involve matching its appearance with a picture on Google images. Determine the display"s resolution and the driver chip.

Find out whether there is an Arduino driver available. Google is your friend here. Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library works with many displays. (http://www.rinkydinkelectronics.com/library.php?i...)

Download and install the driver library. On a Linux machine, as root, copy the library archive file to the /usr/share/arduino/libraries directory and untar or unzip it.

Load an example sketch into the Arduino IDE, and then upload it to the attached Arduino board with wired-up TFT display. With luck, you will see text and/or graphics.

We"ll begin with a simple one. The ILI9163 display has a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. With 8 pins in a single row, it works fine with a standard Arduino UNO or with a Mega. The hardware hookup is simple -- only 8 connections total! The library put together by a smart fella, by the name of sumotoy, makes it possible to display text in multiple colors and to draw lines.

Note that these come in two varieties, red and black. The red ones may need a bit of tweaking to format the display correctly -- see the comments in the README.md file. The TFT_ILI9163C.h file might need to be edited.

It is 5-volt friendly, since there is a 74HC450 IC on the circuit board that functions as a level shifter. These can be obtained for just a few bucks on eBay and elsewhere, for example -- $3.56 delivered from China. It uses Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and it does a fine job with text and graphics. Note that due to the memory requirement of UTFT, this display will work with a standard UNO only with extensive tweaking -- it would be necessary to delete pretty much all the graphics in the sketch, and just stay with text.

This one is a 2.2" (diagonal) display with 176x220 resolution and parallel interface. It has a standard ("Intel 8080") parallel interface, and works in both 8-bit and 16-bit modes. It uses the S6D0164 driver in Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and because of the memory requirements of same, works only with an Arduino Mega or Due. It has an SD card slot on its back

This one is a bit of an oddball. It"s a clone of the more common HY-TFT240, and it has two rows of pins, set at right angles to one another. To enable the display in 8-bit mode, only the row of pins along the narrow edge is used. The other row is for the SD card socket on the back, and for 16-bit mode. To interface with an Arduino ( Mega or Due), it uses Henning Karlsen"s UTFT library, and the driver is ILI9325C. Its resolution is 320x240 (hires!) and it incorporates both a touch screen and an SD card slot.

Having determined that a particular TFT display will work with the Arduino, it"s time to think about a more permanent solution -- constructing hard-wired and soldered plug-in boards. To make things easier, start with a blank protoshield as a base, and add sockets for the TFT displays to plug into. Each socket row will have a corresponding row next to it, with each individual hole "twinned" to the adjacent hole in the adjoining row by solder bridges, making them accessible to jumpers to connect to appropriate Arduino pins. An alternative is hard-wiring the socket pins to the Arduino pins, which is neater but limits the versatility of the board.

The key to an effective DIY shield is a neat and logical layout. Sketching the prospective shield on quadrille (graph) paper may be helpful. A multitester or continuity tester might be useful for detecting wiring and soldering errors.

In step 5, you mention that the TFT01 display can"t be used with the UTFT library on an Arduino Uno because of its memory requirements. It can - all you have to do is edit memorysaver.h and disable any display models you"re not using.

I think you should add a disclaimer that the code might make the Arduino Uno unprogrammable afterward (due to use up the two 0 and 1 pin) and link to how to fix it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5290428/how-to-reset-an-arduino-board/8453576?sfb=2#84535760

Tho I realize this is quickly becoming legacy hardware, these 8,16 bit parallel spi with 4 wire controller 3.2in Taft touch display 240x380. It has become very inexpensive with ally of back stock world wide so incorporating them into any project is easier then ever. Sorry to my question. I’m having difficulty finding wiring solution for this lcd. It is a sd1289 3.3 and 5v ,40 pin parallel 8,16 bit. I do not want to use a extra shield,hat or cape or adapter. But there’s a lot of conflicting info about required lvl shifters for this model any help or links to info would be great .. thank you. I hope I gave enough information to understand what I’m adoing

#1 you need a data sheet for the display and pinout and the i/o board attached to the cable.Than before you buy check for a driver for this chip Raydium/RM69071.if no driver lib are you able to write one and do you have the necessary tools to work on this scale to wire it up ..if you answer no than search for an arduino ready product.WCH0

hooking up and adding a lib is no piece of cake insure the screen you buy is arduino ready and sold by a reputable shop with step by step directions...WCH0

I"m sorry that I can"t help you with this. You"ll have to do your own research. See if you can identify the chipset and find out if there"s an Arduino driver for it.0

Arduino has always helped to build projects easily and make them look more attractive.  Programming an LCD screen with touch screen option might sound as a complicated task, but the Arduino libraries and shields had made it really easy. In this project we will use a 2.4” Arduino TFT LCD screen to build our own Arduino Touch Screen calculator that could perform all basic calculations like Addition, Subtraction, Division and Multiplication.

Before we actually dive into the project it is important to know, how this 2.4” TFT LCD Module works and what are the types present in it. Let us take a look at the pinouts of this 2.4” TFT LCD screen module.

As you can see there are 28 pins which will perfectly fit into any Arduino Uno / Arduino Mega Board. A small classification of these pins is given in the table below.

As you can see the pins can be classified in to four main classifications such as LCD Command Pins, LCD Data Pins, SD Card Pins and Power Pins, We need not know much about the detailed working of these pins since they will be take care by our Arduino Library.

You can also find an SD card slot at the bottom of the module shown above, which can be used to load an SD card with bmp image files, and these images can be displayed in our TFT LCD screen using the Arduino Program.

Another important thing to note is your Interface IC. There are many types of TFT modules available in the market starting from the original Adafruit TFT LCD module to cheap Chinese clones. A program which works perfectly for your Adafruit shield might not work the same for Chinese breakout boards. So, it is very important to know which types of LCD display your are holding in hand. This detail has to be obtained from the vendor. If you are having a cheap clone like mine then it is most probably using the ili9341 driver IC.You can follow this TFT LCD interfacing with Arduino tutorial to try out some basic example programs and get comfortable with the LCD screen. Also check out our other TFT LCD projects with Arduino here:

If you planning to use the touch screen function of your TFT LCD module, then you have to calibrate it to make it work properly.  A LCD screen without calibration might work unlikely, for instance you might touch at one place and the TFT might respond for a touch at some other place. These calibrations results will not be similar for all boards and hence you are left on your own to do this.

The 2.4” TFT LCD screen is a perfect Arduino Shield. You can directly push the LCD screen on top of the Arduino Uno and it will perfectly match with the pins and slid in through. However, as matters of safety cover the Programming terminal of your Arduino UNO with a small insulation tape, just in case if the terminal comes in contact with your TFT LCD screen. The LCD assembled on UNO will look something like this below.

We are using the SPFD5408 Library to get this arduino calculator code working. This is a modified library of Adafruit and can work seamlessly with our LCD TFT Module. You can check the complete program at the end of this Article.

Now, open Arduino IDE and select Sketch -> Include Librarey -> Add .ZIP library. A browser window will open navigate to the ZIP file and click “OK”. You should notice “Library added to your Libraries” on the bottom-left corner of Arduino, if successful. A detailed guide to do the same is given in the Interfacing Tutorial.

Now, you can use the code below in your Arduino IDE and upload it to your Arduino UNO for the Touch Screen Calculator to work. Further down, I have explained the code into small segments.

We need three libraries for this program to work; all these three libraries were given in the ZIP file you downloaded from the above provided link. I have simply included them in the code as shown below.

As said earlier we need to calibrate the LCD screen to make it work as expected, but don’t worry the values given here are almost universal. The variables TS_MINX, TS_MINY, TS_MAXX, and TS_MAXY decide the calibration of the Screen. You can toy around them if you feel the calibration is not satisfactory.

As we know the TFT LCD screen can display a lot of colours, all these colours have to be entered in hex value. To make it more human readable we assign these values to a variable as shown below.

The final step is to calculate the result and display them on TFT LCD Screen. This arduino calculator can perform operation with 2 numbers only. These two numbers are named as variables “Num1” and “Num2”. The variable “Number” gives and takes value from Num1 and Num2 and also bears the result.

The working of this Arduino Touch Screen Calculator is simple. You have to upload the below given code on your Arduino and fire it up. You get the calculator displayed on your LCD screen.

Now, you can enter any number and perform your calculations. It is limited to only two operand and only operator for now. But, you can tweak the code to make it have lots of option.

Note: The following picture is the connection diagram of the 2.8-inch TFT screen and Arduino uno, but this product is connected in exactly the same way.

If the Arduino board has an ICSP interface, set the SPI Config switch on the display module to the ICSP direction (by default) (the company"s Arduino UNO motherboard has an ICSP interface, just plug it in directly.).

This product uses the same LCD control chip and touch panel control chip as the 3.5-inch TFT screen of the same series of our company, so the code is completely compatible. The following takes 3.5-inch TFT as an example to introduce.

LCD_Show can display colorful patterns with different shapes and times. LCD_ShowBMP is for displaying the picture in BMP, and LCD_Touch is for using the touching function.

The display controller used in this product is ILI9486, and we need to initialize the controller through the SPI communication protocol, and the initialization functions are written in LCD_Driver.cpp.

The function functions related to the screen display are written in LCD_GUI.cpp. The function of each function and the parameters passed are explained in the source code. You can call it directly when you need to use it.

Before using LCD_ShowBMP to display pictures, first copy the pictures in the PIC folder in the data to the root directory of the SD card (you should understand that in the root directory, that is to save the pictures directly to the SD card, do not put them in any subfolders folder.).

These functions are all written in LCD_Bmp.cpp. In fact, the image data in BMP format with a specific file name is read from the SD card, and then the display function written by us is called to re-express the data as an image.

No matter which platform this method is on, the principle is similar. Interested friends can check the relevant information and study the relevant code carefully.

In fact, you can also use Image2Lcd image modulo software to convert images of different sizes and formats into array data, and then use the functions we wrote to display them.

Note: The following picture is the connection diagram of the 2.8-inch TFT screen and XNUCLEO-F103RB, but this product is connected in exactly the same way.

The demos are developed based on the HAL library. Download the program, find the STM32 program file directory, and open STM32\XNUCLEO-F103RB\lcd4in-demo\MDK-ARM\ lcd4in-demo.uvprojx.

This product uses the same LCD control chip and touch panel control chip as the 3.5-inch TFT screen of the same series of our company, so the code is completely compatible. The following takes 3.5-inch TFT as an example to introduce.

After running the demo, it displays some characters and patterns at first, then displays four pictures, and finally displays the touch sketchpad function. Actually, three projects in the Arduino platform code are integrated in the main function, we place the three main functions in sequence and place TP_DrawBoard(); in an infinite loop to achieve the above functions.

Before using LCD_ShowBMP to display pictures, copy the pictures in the PIC folder in the data to the root directory of the SD card, and then insert the SD card into the SD card slot on the back of the screen to start the download program verification.

In fact, you can also use Image2Lcd image modulo software to convert images of different sizes and formats into array data, and then use the functions we wrote to display them.

Begin by carefully starting the rear connector of the TFT shield onto the Arduino Mega. Go slowly and ensure that all pins are inserted correctly and are straight.

In order to use 3.2″ TFT lcd  Shield , We must have the libraries. So you can download  (UTFT Library) and (URTouch Library) install the library by extracting that zipped file in the library folder as shown below.

I bought four MCU Friend 3.5″ TFT shields.  And, unfortunately, they have spiraled me into a deep, dark place trying to figure out how to use them.  The the documentation consists of a sticker on the antistatic bag, a picture of the shield with a list of 5 different possible LCD drivers, a pinout, and a block of code that supposedly represents the startup code.  The unfortunate part is that none of these have been exactly right – they all have errors.  This article is a description of the journey to figuring out how to use them.

Here is a picture of the bag. (the QR code is a number “181024202132” which I thought might be a phone number but isn’t.  It also doesn’t match anything in google, so i’m not sure what it is.

It also has a picture which says the LCD has one of several different controllers (and after digging in I know for a fact that two of mine were made by Raydium and are not on the list)

And finally a table of pins.  Which is interesting as it lists 37 pins when the shield has no where near that number.  And it shows the shield as  16-bit interface which it isnt … and it shows some LEDs which aren’t there either.

I bought 4 different shields.  One came broken.  The other three are all different.  When you look at the boards there are two visibly different configurations

Next, I started down the path of trying to figure out what the controllers were by using register reads.  David Prentice (the guy who wrote/maintains the MCU Friend_kbv Arduino library) has an absolute ton of responses on the Arduino forum trying to help people figure out what their shield is.  He asks them to post the register report from his example program LCD_ID_readnew which is included as an example in the library.

When you look at these LCD controllers they all have some variant of “Read ID” which responds with 1-6 bytes.  The basic idea of this program is to look at what bytes are returned to try to identify the controller.  Here is an example of what I got when I ran the LCD_ID_readnew program on my shields:

The key thing to see in this output is the register 0x04 which says 54,80,66 which identifies this as a Raydium RM68140 LCD controller.  Here is a snapshot from the data sheet.

Presumably the “68 14” corresponds to a Raydium 68140, but who knows?  When I posted this on the Arduino forum, David Prentice responded (David does yeoman’s labor helping people and should be Thanked for all of his pro-bono work and putting up with a bunch of really bad questions)

After digging some more, I decided that it is super ugly out there, as you find that there are a significant number of LCD controllers that are clones, copies, pirated etc… and that they all present themselves differently.  And, in hindsight I think that this is the reason that my ILI9341 from the previous article doesnt quite work correctly.

The next thing that I did was try out the startup code that MCUFriend_kbv generates.  I used the same technique from PSoC 6 + Segger EmWin + MCUFriend 2.4″ Part 1 and spit out the startup bytes.  Here they are:

Well, things still aren’t quite right, so for some strange reason, I keep going and try to use the startup code from the web.  In order to make it work I translate

Earlier I told you that I much preferred to use the more compact startup code.  In order to match this, I decided to add a new code “0xDD” which means delay.  (I hope that there are no controllers out there that use 0XDD).  Here is the updated function:

At this point I have spent a frightening amount of time figuring out how these screens work.  Although it has been a good learning experience, I have generally decided that using unknown displays from China with LCD drivers of questionable origin is not worth the pain of trying to sort out the interface.  Beyond that: