mcufriend.com lcd tft display supplier

This note introduces a low-cost Thin Film Transistor (TFT) display to enhance the operation and usefulness of Liquid Crystal Display(LCD) devices. TFT technology controls the pixel element on the glass surface thereby greatly reducing image blurring and improving viewing angles.

The test board chosen for this exercise is the Elegoo Arduino UNO board from the corresponding Super Starter Kit. The kit already has several simple numeric and text displays. The TFT display may perhaps provide better ways to interact in applications.

The controller for the illustrated model of the TFT display is SSD1297.This information is important because the display (owing to its low cost and high popularity) has many different manufacturers who may not leverage the same controller instruction set. The specification of the controller in the coding exercises is examined in the Appendix section of this note.

Some familiarity with the coordinate system for displays (i.e. top-left is0, 0) and the packing of RGB values into a 16-bit word (5 for R &B, 6 for G) makes the learning curve ramp at a faster pace.

Of course, the display can be mounted elsewhere and the pins connected to the Arduino directly or indirectly using, for example, a breadboard. Other components can then use the breadboard in lieu of a shield with custom connectors. Of course, without access to such anon-standard or readily available breadboard, it is impossible to illustrate this arrangement in this note.

The Examples folder for the library provides the starter files for the tests. If you are using a newer display you will need the updated libraries from the GitHub repository (see link in References below)and using the#definestatement to identify the display model.

The output from the diagnostic program, LCD_ID_reading.ino, is shown below:Read Registers on MCUFRIEND UNO shieldcontrollers either read as single 16-bite.g. the ID is at readReg(0)or as a sequence of 8-bit valuesin special locations (first is dummy)reg(0x0000) 97 97ID: ILI9320, ILI9325, ILI9335, ...reg(0x0004) 97 97 97 97Manufacturer IDreg(0x0009) 97 97 97 97 97Status Registerreg(0x000A) 97 97Get Power Modereg(0x000C) 97 97Get Pixel Formatreg(0x0061) 97 97RDID1 HX8347-Greg(0x0062) 97 97RDID2 HX8347-Greg(0x0063) 97 97RDID3 HX8347-Greg(0x0064) 97 97RDID1 HX8347-Areg(0x0065) 97 97RDID2 HX8347-Areg(0x0066) 97 97RDID3 HX8347-Areg(0x0067) 97 97RDID Himax HX8347-Areg(0x0070) 97 97Panel Himax HX8347-Areg(0x00A1) 97 97 97 97 97RD_DDB SSD1963reg(0x00B0) 97 97RGB Interface Signal Controlreg(0x00B4) 97 97Inversion Controlreg(0x00B6) 97 97 97 97 97Display Controlreg(0x00B7) 97 97Entry Mode Setreg(0x00BF) 97 97 97 97 97 97ILI9481, HX8357-Breg(0x00C0) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97Panel Controlreg(0x00C8) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMAreg(0x00CC) 97 97Panel Controlreg(0x00D0) 97 97 97Power Controlreg(0x00D2) 97 97 97 97 97NVM Readreg(0x00D3) 97 97 97 97ILI9341, ILI9488reg(0x00D4) 97 97 97 97Novatek IDreg(0x00DA) 97 97RDID1reg(0x00DB) 97 97RDID2reg(0x00DC) 97 97RDID3reg(0x00E0) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMA-Preg(0x00E1) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMA-Nreg(0x00EF) 97 97 97 97 97 97ILI9327reg(0x00F2) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97Adjust Control 2reg(0x00F6) 97 97 97 97Interface Control

The controller is referenced as SSD1297 with ID=0x9797. This display requires the use of the following statement in the code prior to the invocation of other header files for the display. Please review the header files for the equivalent#define SUPPORT_1289

Many thanks toDavidPrenticefor the display driver library and the guidance, support and advice during the tests for this display. I would have failed at the starting block without his generous assistance. He is an authority on the drivers for this class of displays.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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:

I bought a 2.4" TFT display to use with Arduino Yun. Unfortunately it doesn"t appear to be working as manufacturer/seller claime as "Arduino compatible".

there are (now) a lot of 2.8" TFT Pi designs out there. I believe mine was the first, and has been around in one form or another for over a year now. I offer full support on this forum, and here is the support thread :

By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println();. First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().

I tried to run the library with an mcufriend LCD TFT 2.4 with no good results. This is the output on graphictest_kbv.ino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyezm6JvmiY

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.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

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.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

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.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

Size of displays affects your project parameters. Bigger Display is not always better. if you want to display high-resolution images and signs, you should choose a big size display with higher resolution. But it decreases the speed of your processing, needs more space and also needs more current to run.

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 display driver will typically accept commands and data using an industry-standard general-purpose serial or parallel interface, such as TTL, CMOS, RS232, SPI, I2C, etc. and generate signals with suitable voltage, current, timing and demultiplexing to make the display show the desired text or image.

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.

By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println(); . First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().

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 created a function which accepts numbers as input and displays them as a pie chart. We just use draw arc and filled circle functions.

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.

I am trying to interface a touch scren lcd with stm32 board. I have an mcufriend 2.4" touch screen lcd and i intend to interface it with nucleo-f303re board. I ,unfortunately, am not able to find a datasheet for the lcd. I know that the lcd can be interfaced with spi. but as i mentioned i do not have any datasheet for the lcd. Does anyone has any information on where to find the datasheet or a library for the lcd?

TFT(proto_t displayproto,PortName port, PinName CS, PinName reset, PinName DC, PinName WR, PinName RD, const int lcdsize_x, const int lcdsize_y, const char* name);

TFT(proto_t displayproto,PinName* buspins, PinName CS, PinName reset, PinName DC, PinName WR, PinName RD, const int lcdsize_x, const int lcdsize_y, const char* name);

TFT(proto_t displayproto, int Hz, PinName mosi, PinName miso, PinName sclk, PinName CS, PinName reset, PinName DC, const int lcdsize_x, const int lcdsize_y, const char* name);

Well, I bought a Chinese LCD TFT touchscreen, 3.5 inches, but I cant get it working, because I cant find the drivers. The only thing it says in the back is www.mcufriend.com, but the page is not available. I tried following this tutorial, but the screen only appears white.