nextion tft lcd free sample

In the latest Nextion Editor ver 1.65.1, components are allowed to be moved or dragged at runtime which would be more flexible for you to design the HMI GUI. With the loading effect of Components and Pages, a friendly dynamic and superb GUI can be created in the most efficient way.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface （HMI） solution combining an onboard processor and memory touch display with Nextion Editor software for HMI GUI project development.

Using the Nextion Editor software, you can quickly develop the HMI GUI by drag-and-drop components (graphics, text, button, slider, etc.) and ASCII text-based instructions for coding how components interact on the display side.

Nextion HMI display connects to peripheral MCU via TTL Serial (5V, TX, RX, GND) to provide event notifications that peripheral MCU can act on, the peripheral MCU can easily update progress, and status back to Nextion display utilizing simple ASCII text-based instructions.

Nextion is a Seamless Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution that provides a control and visualisation interface between a human and a process, machine, application or appliance. Nextion is mainly applied to IoT or consumer electronics field. It is the best solution to replace the traditional LCD and LED Nixie tube. Available from 2.4″ to 7″ models, Nextion provides an analog touch screen operator interface with programmable function buttons, gauges, progress bars…etc., Nextion is an interface solution designed to complement your application needs.

Nextion Display has so many goods, you may not have a thorough understanding for it. In following blog series, I will give a comprehensive introduction for Nextion. If you are a green hand, these blogs are just the things to help you get started.

There are 6 sizes of Nextion available for your selection: 2.4″, 2.8″, 3.2″, 4.3″, 5.0″ and 7.0″. Users can see the overall detailed parameters from the below table:

Nextion TFT display uses only one serial port to do communication which helps users get rid of the wiring trouble. We notice that most engineers spend a lot of time in application development but get unsatisfactory results. In this case, Nextion editor has provided mass components, such as button, text, progress bar, slider, instrument panel etc. to enrich your interface design. And the drag-and-drop function ensures that users will spend less time in programming, which will reduce your 99% development workloads. With the help of this WYSIWYG editor, GUI designing is a piece of cake.

Nextion display is just the choice to solve your programming problems with the minimum of time and effort. Nextion is a better solution than ever, as users can see its competitive edges as below, not to mention its good price:

3. Objective-oriented controlling method. Nextion supports the commands not only to draw points or lines, but also to control most attributes of the components and materials.

4. Users can control the objects in a demo through serial port commands by external MCU even the demo has already been downloaded and demonstrated on Nextion screen.

Users might get a headache on which size to choose. But we have prepared you very detailed products specification that covering every model of Nextion Display. Have a look, you will know which one to choose according to your project requirements.

This post is an introduction to the Nextion display with the Arduino. We’re going to show you how to configure the display for the first time, download the needed resources, and how to integrate it with the Arduino UNO board. We’ll also make a simple graphical user interface to control the Arduino pins.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution. Nextion displays are resistive touchscreens that makes it easy to build a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a great solution to monitor and control processes, being mainly applied to IoT applications.

The Nextion has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls the display, for example it takes care of generating the buttons, creating text, store images or change the background. The Nextion communicates with any microcontroller using serial communication at a 9600 baud rate.

To design the GUI, you use the Nextion Editor, in which you can add buttons, gauges, progress bars, text labels, and more to the user interface in an easy way. We have the 2.8” Nextion display basic model, that is shown in the following figure.

The best model for you, will depend on your needs. If you’re just getting started with Nextion, we recommend getting the 3.2” size which is the one used in the Nextion Editor examples (the examples also work with other sizes, but you need to make some changes). Additionally, this is the most used size, which means more open-source examples and resources for this size.

To get started with Nextion, first you need to install Nextion Editor. Go to https://nextion.itead.cc/, select the Resources tab, Download > Nextion Editor and install Nextion Editor. You can either download the .zip file or the .exe file.

Connecting the Nextion display to the Arduino is very straightforward. You just need to make four connections: GND, RX, TX, and +5V. These pins are labeled at the back of your display, as shown in the figure below.

You can power up the Nextion display directly from the Arduino 5V pin, but it is not recommended. Working with insufficient power supply may damage the display. So, you should use an external power source. You should use a 5V/1A power adaptor with a micro USB cable. Along with your Nextion display, you’ll also receive a USB to 2 pin connector, useful to connect the power adaptor to the display.

The best way to get familiar with a new software and a new device is to make a project example. Here we’re going to create a user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins, and display data.

We won’t cover step-by-step how to build the GUI in the Nextion display. But we’ll show you how to build the most important parts, so that you can learn how to actually build the user interface. After following the instructions, you should be able to complete the user interface yourself.

Open Nextion Editor and go to File > New to create a new file. Give it a name and save it. Then, a window pops up to chose your Nextion model, as show in the figure below.

We’ll start by adding a background image. To use an image as a background, it should have the exact same dimensions as your Nextion display. We’re using the 2.8” display, so the background image needs to be 240×320 pixels. Check your display dimensions and edit your background image accordingly. As an example, we’re using the following image:

Once the GUI is ready, you need to write the Arduino code so that the Nextion can interact with the Arduino and vice-versa. Writing code to interact with the Nextion display is not straightforward for beginners, but it also isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

A good way to learn how to write code for the Arduino to interact with the Nextion display is to go to the examples folder in the Nextion library folder and explore. You should be able to copy and paste code to make the Arduino do what you want.

In this post we’ve introduced you to the Nextion display. We’ve also created a simple application user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins. The application built is just an example for you to understand how to interface different components with the Arduino – we hope you’ve found the instructions as well as the example provided useful.

In our opinion, Nextion is a great display that makes the process of creating user interfaces simple and easy. Although the Nextion Editor has some issues and limitations it is a great choice for building interfaces for your electronics projects. We have a project on how to create a Node-RED physical interface with the Nextion display and an ESP8266 to control outputs. Feel free to take a look.

Nextion is a Chinese company which build, in my opinion, the best HMI (Human-Machine-Interface) displays for DIY microcontroller projects. All of their displays have a touch panel and an onboard processor (MCU) combined with onboard memory. That is why the functions of the Nextion display far exceed that of a normal display. Also the displays has an UART connection, that enables the displays to communicate with all microcontrollers (e.g. Arduino, ESP8266) or single-board computers (e.g. Raspberry Pi).

The following table shows the different technical specifications of the Nextion display compared to the ESP8266 NodeMCU V2 and the Arduino Uno regarding computation power and memory size.

Nextion builds 3 different display series: Basic, Enhanced and Intelligent. All three series have the touch function as well as integrated flash, RAM and a MCU. If you order a display, no matter what series, a power supply board (Micro-USB to 5V GPIO) and cables to connect the display are included.

The enhanced models not only have the connection to your microcontroller, but also 8 additional digital pins, of which 4 are PWM capable. These additional pins are used with an Nextion expansion board that includes 6 buttons, 1 LED and 1 piezo buzzer. With the combination of enhanced display and expansion board, you can make basic projects without a microcontroller. In this case you have to program the logic in the display MCU which I also show you in this tutorial. The following picture shows you the difference if you use the expansion board or a microcontroller. The picture is only a schematic sketch and the wiring is not correct.

Now we want to know how to build a HMI with the Nextion display. This is done by the Nextion Editor, a free GUI (graphical user interface) development software. You can download the latest version of the software on the Nextion website.

After we create the project you have to know the basic functions of the Nextion Editor. From the picture above you see that there are 8 planes that are described in the following section:

Page Plane: With the Nextion displays you can create virtual pages where you can show different information. You HMI needs at least one page that is added when you create a new project. Also you can export and import pages so save time and reuse different kind of pages.

The short answer would be via a micro SD card, but in reality it was a little bit trickier. The basic requirement for the Nextion display is that the SD card has to be in FAT32 format. First I tried to use a 64 GB micro SD card but unfortunately when I tried to format the card in Windows 10 there was no option to format the 64 GB micro SD card to FAT32.

After the SD card is ready we have to compile our code to make sure that the compiler does not find any errors. You find the compile button ins the Toolbox and the output of the compiler in the output box at the bottom left in the Nextion Editor.

The next step in the Nextion Editor is to export the TFT file to the micro SD card. Click on File in the main menu and select TFT file output. Now you choose your FAT32 formatted micro SD card and export the file to the card. If you wish, you could check if the TFT file is on the SD card.

The last step is to place the SD cart into the SD card slot of your Nextion display. After powering the display up, you see that the display recognizes the SD card and loads the file in the internal memory of the display.

Good news: the Nextion developers created a library for Arduino and Raspberry Pi that makes the coding much easier. The bad thing is, that this library is not included in the Arduino IDE library search. Therefore we install the library manually in 4 steps:Download the Arduino library for Nextion Display as ZIP file from the official github repository to a local folder of your choice.

Move the ITEADLIB_Arduino_Nextion folder to your Arduino IDE installation libraries folder. If you do not know how your library folder is located you can search for Arduino/libraries and will find the folder, see the following picture.

The Nextion library is configured for the Arduino Mega. If you use the Arduino Mega for this project, you can skip the next step. But if you use for example an Arduino Uno, like me, we have to change the configurations of the library because the Arduino Mega has two hardware serials and the Arduino Uno for example only one.

Now everything is setup and we can create our first basic example. After the basic example I show you a more advanced example where we also use the program function of the Nextion display itself.

The first example is an easy basic example where you learn how to add buttons and use a number field to make a counter with a reset button. This example has only one page to keep it simple. If you are new to the Nextion display, this tutorial is right for you, but if you are already advanced, you can jump to the next example where I show you a more complex example.

You can download every file I use in this example with the following download button. You download a zip file that includes the Nextion Editor TFT file, the used fonts, a picture and the Arduino script.

If you have not already started your Nextion Editor, you can open it now. Like in the video I showed you at the beginning of this tutorial, the first step in a new project is to select your Nextion display and select the horizontal or vertical display direction. In the second step you can create one or more fonts for this project. I created two fonts, one with a height of 16 and the second with a height of 32 to display text a little bit bigger.

The following picture shows the UART connection between the Nextion display and the Arduino Uno which I use for this example. In this project the power supply is provided via micro USB and the Power Supply Test Board which is part of the Nextion package.

Like in every other script, the first thing we have to do is to include all the libraries we need. For this example we only need the Nextion library. Then we define the Nextion objects based on the added components in the editor. The logic to add an object is the same every time, which shows the following table.

Object: The object is the library name of the Nextion component that you added to your editor. For example the button component of the editor is the NexButton object. You simply add “Nex” in front of the component.

The function is called for the b0 object and in the Nextion Editor we defined that the component should have a touch press event and not a touch release event. The touch press event is the push callback and the touch release event would be a pop callback.

After the two functions are defined, we create the setup function in the Arduino IDE. Because we use the UART communication between the Nextion display and the microcontroller, the baud rate is set to 9600 which is recommended by Nextion. Also the Nextion library is initialized in the setup function. The last part of the setup function is to register the push or pop event callback functions. The callback function asks: When do I have to executed the predefined functions? Therefore we attach the push event to both objects and define that if the event occurs, the predefined functions should be called.

This advanced example shows how to use the internal programming capabilities of the Nextion displays and also how to control lights and visualize the temperature and humidity of a DHT11 sensor module.

First we create the interface in the Nextion Editor. Therefore create a new project and select your display model. For this advanced example I use the landscape orientation of the display. You can use the already created font from the basic example or create a new one. The following two pictures show the interface we want to build with two pages.

Now every site and component is set up and you can test if everything is working with the debug function of the Nextion Editor. After everything is working you can compile the project and export the TFT file to the micro SD card.

At the beginning of the Arduino script we include the Nextion and DHT libraries and define the pins where the DHT11 module and the LED is connected. With the DHT11 model type and the pin, we create a dht11module object.

I hope you learned a lot about the Nextion display in this tutorial. If you have any question regarding the Nextion displays in general or the examples in this article, use the following comment section to ask your question. I will answer the question as soon as possible.

A: Nextion works with many MCUs, but we only offer Library for arduino and Linux. You need to develop Lib for other MCUs, and all instructions must strictly follow Nextion Instruction Set

A: Choose HMI file in Nextion Editor -Click "Compile" and it"ll show "Compile Successful!" in the bottom of software -Choose "File","TFT file output" -Click "Output" and save TFT file.

A: Prepare a SD card ( FAT32 format and less than 32GB) -Copy TFT file from PC to SD card (ensure only one TFT file in it) -Insert SD card into Nextion card slot -Power on Nextion -File uploaded automatically and displays "Update Successed!" after completed -Power off Nextion -Remove SD card -Power on and project will show on Nextion.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution. Nextion is a resistive touchscreen display that makes it easy to build a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a great solution to monitor and control processes, being mainly applied to IoT applications.

The Nextion has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls the display, for example it takes care of generating the buttons, creating text, store images or change the background. The Nextion communicates with any microcontroller using serial communication at a 9600 baud rate.

So, it works with any board that has serial capabilities like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP8266, ESP32, and so on. Learn how to use the Nextion display with the Arduino.

The best model for you depends on your needs. If you’re just getting started with Nextion, we recommend getting the 3.2″ size which is the one used with the official Nextion Arduino library examples (the examples also work with other sizes, but you need to make some changes).