stm32f4 discovery stm32f429 tft lcd manufacturer

STM32F429 Discovery is a development board provided by STMicroelectronics. It has extremely powerful microcontroller STM32F429ZIT6 with 32bit arm cortex M4 and hardware floating point.

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

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

The STM32F429 Discovery helps you to discover the high-performance microcontrollers of the STM32 F4 series and to develop your applications easily. It offers everything required for beginners and experienced users to get started quickly.

Based on the STM32F429ZIT6, it includes an ST-LINK/V2 embedded debug tool, a 2.4″ QVGA TFT LCD, an external SDRAM of 64 Mbits, a gyroscope ST MEMs, a USB OTG micro-AB connector, LEDs and pushbuttons.

A large number of free ready-to-run application firmware examples are available on www.st.com/stm32f4-discovery to support quick evaluation and development.

GPIO configuration is done similiar way as in example for SDRAM. But unfortuneatly TFT controller pins are shared in two alternate functions group (9 and 14), so there is third table with AF initialization values.

At this moment easiest way to display antything on LCD is use random content that SDRAM holds after power-up. Go to sdram.c file and comment following lines:

The STM32F429 Discovery helps you to discover the high-performance microcontrollers of the STM32 F4 series and to develop your applications easily. It offers everything required for beginners and experienced users to get started quickly.

Based on the STM32F429ZIT6, it includes an ST-LINK/V2 embedded debug tool, a 2.4″ QVGA TFT LCD, an external SDRAM of 64 Mbits, a gyroscope ST MEMs, a USB OTG micro-AB connector, LEDs and pushbuttons.

A large number of free ready-to-run application firmware examples are available on www.st.com/stm32f4-discovery to support quick evaluation and development.

It’s time to write about a more complex but interesting connection with the STM32F4-Discovery board. Since I started developing with electronics, I’ve found a lot of applications in which an LCD is needed or can be an added value, specially if it includes a Touchscreen.

Last week I received a 3.2″ TFT LCD with Touchscreen from waveshare, model HY32D. It is based on SSD1289 display controller and also includes a touchscreen interface based on XPT2046 which communicates over SPI link. With a QVGAresolution (320×240 pixels) is enough for many applications and, more important, it is very affordable.

Well, fortunately Waveshare(LCD module supplier) includes some code to drive different kinds of displays and touchscreens. On Waveshare module’s page there is also a very helpful table that indicates the pinout (also the module itself has named pins on bottom side) that helps wiring to the board. Basically I have connected in this way:

LTDC interface setting are configured in CubeMx. In the program lcd data buffer is created with some values and it"s starting address is mapped to the LTDC frame buffer start address.

At this moment display doesn"t react to data sent by the LTDC. It only shows white and black strips, after i connect ground and power for digital circuit to the 3 volts source. VLED+ is connected to the 9 volts source. The VSYNC, HSYNC and CLOCK signals are generated by the LTDC and they match with specified values. I measured them on LCD strip, so the connection should be right. I also tried putting pulse on the LCD reset pin, but that doesn"t make any sense.

Maybe signal polarity is wrong or i am missing something else. The program i am using now, worked on stm32f429-discovery build in LCD i just changed the timings. Any suggestions?

One of my favorite features of the STM32F429 discovery board is the TFT-LCD display. After setting up the programming IDE I started looking at the code examples given by ST. One code example caught my eye: The "LTDC_Display_2Layers" project.

I imported the project as explained in my STM32F4 Tutorial and modified the code so that instead of the two ST logos moving around on the screen, a jumping monoclecat is displayed. When you press the "USER" button, the cat jumps higher.

The 32F429IDISCOVERY kit leverages the capabilities of the STM32F429 high-performance microcontrollers, to allow users to easily develop rich applications with advanced Graphic User interfaces.

STEmbedded software for STM32F4 series (HAL low level drivers, USB, TCP/IP, File system, RTOS, Graphic - coming with examples running on ST boards: STM32 Nucleo, Discovery kits and Evaluation boards)

With our last update, we looked at some of the features of the STM32F429ZTI chip on the STM32F429-DISCO board. Today, let"s look at some of the features of the Discovery board on which the chip is mounted.

A dev board, of course, is more than just the processor on the board. A manufacturer will (hopefully) include a smattering of other devices on the board to help demonstrate the features of the microcontroller. In the case of the F429 Discovery board, the following features are included:

An on-board ST-LINK/V2 on STM32F429I-DISCO (old order code) or ST-LINK/V2-B on STM32F429I-DISC1 (new order code). I have the older DISCO board and not the newer DISC1 board. To the best of my knowledge, the two will behave identically. Having an onboard debugger is handy: the debugger allows you to program the chip, and debug running code. As a bonus, the onboard debugger can be disconnected from the onboard STM32F429 chip and can be used to program any STM32 chip with just a few jumper wires.

A 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD. The LCD driver is one of the features that really sets the STM32F429 apart from others in the crowded microcontroller market. While other chips are appearing that have an onboard LCD controller (such as the PIC32MZ-DA series), the price point and ready availability of the STM32 DISCOVERY boards (it seems like everyone has a discovery board from at least one of the STM32 series lying around) sets this board, and therefore this chip, apart from its competitors.

64-Mbit SDRAM. While the primary use of this DRAM is to hold the framebuffer for the LCD display, the ability to store lots of data in RAM opens up interesting possibilities.

USB OTG connector. This is a nifty proposition. The STM32F429 can act as a USB device (say, a joystick, or a mouse, or a keyboard, or even, if we were to get really creative, it could be the brains of a printer or a scanner), or a USB host (that is, something that you can plug USB devices into). Theoretically, the onboard USB transceiver supports USB OTG functionality, which allows the chip to negotiate whether it"s the host or the device. But frankly, I don"t know enough about USB to dive into that, and I really don"t care enough to learn. So USB OTG is not going to be part of this tutorial series.

There are some features that have been left out of the Discovery board. For instance, there"s no 32.768 kHz crystal to drive the real-time clock. Nor is there an Ethernet PHY and magjack. There are solder pads for a RTC crystal, though, so we might be able to remedy that issue by ourselves. I doubt that we"ll be able to get Ethernet working.

While it"s certainly not the biggest or baddest dev board on the market, the STM32F429-DISCOVERY has enough features included to make it a worthwhile learning and development platform. At a current price point of $30, it really has a high value proposition to hobbyists who"d like to step up from the Arduino ecosystem to something more capable.