stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

2023-01-03 12:32:11

Ahh yeah look at that! If you look closely, top right of the LCD, that’s obviously a flex connector for a resistive touch overlay (4 contacts running to the 4 sides of the LCD overlay).

Agreed! I will be picking one up. I’ve been happy developing for the stm32f4discovery (and other stm32 chips) with gcc, openocd and gdb. It is all free.

The STM32F4 cores are pretty well supported by libopencm3 and Code Sourcery and summon-arm-toolchain both build working toolchains and openOCD supports the stlink natively now.

A fair number of inexpensive baseboards/motherboards/accessories have also appeared for earlier versions. I hope Olimex puts out a couple nice STM32F429/427 boards.

I can see there is only a STLINK usb connector on board, so there is even no FS to expect. beside HS, I suppose does mean High Speed (480mbps). but HS anyway needs a separate physical layer USB chip for addition to STM32F4 chip and most likely this is chip is not present on this board anyway, because this is STM32F4+LCD+SDRAM demoboard and there is no need for USB at all.

The data brief bullet-points “USB OTG with micro-AB connector”. Looks like the micro-usb is on the underside, sticking out at the bottom of the photo. With matching T/H mounting tabs on the topside, labelled USB USER. But like you said, the STM32F4 requires an external PHY for HS, and it seems unlikely they’d include one on this board.

I think Farnell’s 21€ will be accurate, as ST’s suggested USD price is $24. The placeholders for the STM32F429I-DISCO on element14 (a division of Farnell) and mouser show $42, which I think predates the later ST announcement. I think the ST announced $24 will hold, and the distributor prices will match that, as they have in the past.

I wouldn’t expect TI to hack profits from their calculator range, and HP have always been expensive, but ST could easily change their format to calculator-friendly. Clamshell design, LCD & battery in top half, CPU & keypad in bottom half, expansion pins to left / right of keypad makes a self contained unit.

HP Palm – Love the idea, hate the baguette (french bread loaf) layout. If I could get custom key covers, and surface-mount key switches, I’d be designing my own low-profile keypad to go with an LCD module. Top side keypad, bottom side CPU / RAM / USB / LCD driver / power regulation / expansion port.

Great find, thanks! Man, could they have buried the details on that guy any farther down into the document? I can’t help but feel like a quick pointer in the LCD section to “oh by the way there’s a touch screen, here’s how to talk to it” would have been a good idea.

It’s certainly useable in any other project where you have an onboard LCD controller. Especially any other project that happens to use a STM32F4. What difference would it have made if it had an external controller? Surely it’d have been on the same PCB. Were you hoping for a removeable SPI-interfaced module?

Look in the UM1670 user manual, paragraph 4.8: the tft includes an ILI9341 controller. The ILI9341 has it’s own graphics ram inside, it is not mapped into the STM32 address space. It is connected to the STM32 via a parallel bus. The ILI9341 and similar controllers are common on cheap chinese tfts. So it is no problem to source similar tfts for your final product after developing on the discovery board.

UM1670 in paragraph 4.8 also says that “The TFT LCD is a 2.41″ display of 262 K colors. Its definition is QVGA (240 x 320 dots) and is directly driven by the STM32F429ZIT6 using the RGB protocol”. ILI9341 has multiple modes of operation including direct RGB/HSYNC/VSYNC mode which bypasses internal GRAM. I don’t have the board yet but I assume display buffer is located in external SDRAM which is also on the board. The whole point of this kit is to show TFT and SDRAM interface in new STM32F4x9.

I’ve checked this discovery board firmware available from ST’s site (“STM32F429 discovery firmware package UM1662” number: STSW-STM32138, btw. finding it is a bit difficult – ST’s site is terrible):

They are using FreeRTOS, FatFs, STemWinLibrary which is ST’s version of Segger’s emWin graphic library and STM32F4xx_StdPeriph_Driver v1.2.1 which includes F429/439 support (FMC, LTDC and DMA2D added).

Check again martin. Those lines have pullups to vdd and are connected to cpu pins. I have this board for some time and I can confirm that lcd is driven by lcd controller from cpu and frame buffer is in external dram which is also on the board.

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

The STM32 LTDC has a peripheral called LTDC LCD TFT Display Controllerwhichprovides a digital parallel interface(DPI) for a variety of LCD and TFT panels. It sends RGB data in parallel to the display and generates signals for horizontal and vertical synchronization (HSYNC, VSYNC), as well as pixel clock (PCLK) and not data enable (DE) signals:

In this example I use the display on the STM32F429-Discovery board, which is driven by the ILI9341 display controller. The ILI9341 can drive a QVGA (Quarter VGA) 240×320 262,144 colors LCD display. The controller can be configured via SPI (or parallel interface, depending on the panel settings) to use a digital parallel 18 bit RGB interface (since only 6 lines per color channel are wired on the board to the LTDC). Since the display pixel format is less than 8 bit per channel (RGB666 in this case), the RGB display data lines are connected to the most significant bits of the LTDC controller RGB data lines:

Before enabling the LTDC we must configure the clock system. The LTDC uses a specific clock LCD_CLOCK to generate the pixel clock signal and it must be configured and enabled during the system initialization phase:

To display an image we must convert an image file to an array (possibly a const one, so it can be stored in flash memory) of bytes. To do this I used LCD image converter, a simple but powerful application that can convert a file to a variety of different pixel formats:

In this example the framebuffers have a RGB888 color depth and for a 240×320 display that makes 225 KiB of memory for each buffer (3 bytes per pixel x 240 x 320 pixels) so they must be stored in external SRAM (the STM32F429I-DISCOVERY has a 64Mbit external SRAM so we’re good). The FMC Flexible Memory Controller has to be initialized and the address of the two frame buffers has to be configured. Drawing on the framebuffer is a matter of writing the right bytes in order to change the color. Once all pixels are drawn (bytes are written) the buffers are switched and the code can draw the next frame:

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

In this past two weeks I spent some time learning how to create a simple graphic application for my STM32F429I-DISCOVERY board. Since it has a QVGA display with a ILI9341 display controller on board and a STM32F429ZI microcontroller I thought I should give it a try. I’ve been interfacing displays with SPI and 8080 parallel interfaces but since the ILI9341 offers the opportunity to drive the panel using a parallel RGB interface I felt that was the way to go. The STM32 micro has a LTDC display controller that provides all the signals needed to use the RGB interface. I wrote a post on how to configure and use it. It has its own DMA and manages to send all RGB data from a framebuffer in memory to the TFT display generating all the necessary signals to refresh correctly the LCD, leaving the CPU free to do other jobs (for example updating the back buffer). Since I wanted to animate sprites I used double buffering and a single LTDC layer so I needed some extra RAM. Luckyly the board has a 64Mbit (8MB) external SDRAM and the micro has a Flexible Memory Controller that makes accessing the external memory a breeze. So I implemented a little graphic library with some functions to draw on the framebuffer and to swap the buffers once finished:

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

The 32L4R9IDISCOVERY kit is a complete demonstration and development platform for STMicroelectronics Arm® Cortex®-M4 core-based STM32L4R9AI microcontroller.

Leveraging the innovative ultra-low-power oriented features, 640 Kbytes of embedded RAM, graphics performance (Chrom-ART Accelerator™), and DSI controller offered by the STM32L4R9AI, the 32L4R9IDISCOVERY kit enables users to easily prototype applications with state-of-the-art energy efficiency, as well as stunning audio and graphics rendering with direct support for AMOLED DSI round LCD display.

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

The support for the first STM32 Cortex-M based microcontrollers is being developed now, and in February you should see this support go live in the software and libraries alongside the first of a new line of mbed-enabled boards released from ST. Please tell us if you want to be one of the alpha and beta testers (along with your credentials as an alpha and beta tester!)

These are great news! Do you already know which STM32 device you are going to support? Any plans for own "mbedSTM32"-hardware (ready-to-use module) yet?

I used an mbed for a few projects and now I am using an STM32F4 for my thesis work. Would love to see what your new products can do. Sign me up as a tester!

We already use lots of different STM32 parts in our products (lots of fabulous fast ADC channels...) so getting proper mbed-support for them will be a huge bonus.

These are great news! Do you already know which STM32 device you are going to support? Any plans for own "mbedSTM32"-hardware (ready-to-use module) yet?

The STM32f103x series the so-called “high-density line” from STM32 has added features included FSMC (Flexible Static Memory Controller) that is what I need to use.

Hi - I"d be very interested in alpha or beta testing the new STM32 devices. As for credentials: at Acorn, I was the first person ever to port BSD Unix to the ARM (well, jointly with Lawrence Albinson: he did most of the kernel; I did the rest, some drivers and the BSD and GNU toolkits). As an embedded developer, and up to CEO of a manufacturer of ARM-based thin clients, I"ve been using and programming ARMs ever since.

I have working with mbed (i.e. you can see my project Datalogger*.v104) and now I am with STM32 discovery boards. Also I teach about microcontrollers.

Very excited about this announcement. I have been using the STM32 boards with basic tools and I would be pleased to be an alpha and/or beta tester for the mbed community. I have managed and participated in many a test cycle for consulting and in-house projects, both software and hardware.

The STM32F405 is at the heart of my current project and is programmed in .NETMF. I would love to alpha/beta mbed for the STM32. My qualifications are sparse and off target, but perhaps I can give a different perspective:

Designed I/O board using STM32F405RGT6 providing 16 input, 16 output, and 8 assignable; power, activity, and fault LEDs. Created "command shell" for same to allow simple control over serial connection using .NETMF.

Currently mentoring 6th form students who are actively using MBED boards for robotics (stepper motor control slave board) and who last year struggled with the Discovery board (compass and accelerometer)

I"d like to be an alpha/beta tester as well. I"m an embedded firmware engineer, currently working on a mass-market product based on the STM32F405 for a fortune 500 company. I"ve done code on various STM32 chips for three shipping products.

That"s great news! I am waiting to get mbed for SMART energy metering on STM32 platform I am designing. We have our custom firmware and RTOS running on STM32 based energy meter and wish to have mbed running on it. Let"s see, I am waiting to get it.

Let me add to the comments saying great news! I was at an ST seminar a couple of weeks ago and hadn"t realised you were going to do this. We were looking at the new STM32F429 processor and Discovery kit (given away free at the seminars). We had to download the latest Kiel cross-assembler with graphics libraries and a temporary license in order to program examples on the Discovery kit which has a touch screen LCD display. I started a discussion about how much better it would be if we could all have used MBED, but there were a few dissenting comments - one of course was that the UK Kiel salesman was there, but more concerned were a couple of industrial users who said that they didnt trust the security of cloud based systems, and that they could be hacked into in minutes by far eastern conglomerates who could then steal their expensive code. I would welcome some feedback on this from Simon and the team. I for one wouldn"t mind paying a small monthly fee in order to use MBED since it saves me downloading and keeping up to date all the libraries associated with the new processors, 1and certainly dont want to pay £1000"s for the latest full spec commercial cross assemblers, since I only edit a few programs in a year.

Sorry I am brand new into mbed. I have a prototype built around STM32F407 with .net micro framework and I am very eager to migrate to mbed to harness the efficiency of c/c++ code.

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

STM32F429I- DISC1 board is a high performance board with the support of 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD for development of advance GUI (Graphical User Interface). STM32F429I- DISC1 board core is run by high performance ARM Cortex M4, with enough memory of 1Mb for flash programming and 256 Kb for RAM. Beside including primary hardware features for testing the board, it also have L3GD20, ST-MEMS motion sensor 3-axis digital output gyroscope.

The STM32F429I- DISC1 board boards integrate an ST-Link debugger/programmer with a separate selection-mode switch which enables the board to be used as a standalone ST-LINK/V2-1. The board has three functionality USB support: Virtual COM port, mass storage, debug port. A separate USB-OTG is also provided for further debugging of the board.

• STM32F429I-DISCO (old order code) or STLINK/V2-B on STM32F429I-DISC1 (new order code) mbed-enabled (see http://mbed.org) with the new order code only

• Connection to the prototyping board and an easy probing Comprehensive free software including a variety of examples, part of STM32CubeF4 package or STSW-STM32138, for using legacy standard libraries

stm32 discovery tft lcd quotation

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