stm32 lcd display quotation

I think a lot of people don"t know how to use it properly, and they are paying too much for displays with a driver chip and even reinforcing the use of modular Nextion-type displays.

From what I understand from this AN, care must be taken to choose the correct clock to match the display clock, and it must also be necessary to use an external RAM memory as a buffer for the display frame.

Therefore, it may be more advantageous to use a driver chip, to avoid a lot of setup with external memory. Since it"s not just a software issue, but also the hardware doesn"t have all the support to perform the direct operation with the TFT display (it doesn"t accept STN either).

This display uses the I2C protocol to communicate to the microcontroller. So here you need only 2 pins i.e. SDA and SCL from the microcontroller and the VCC and GND.

I searched a lot for the libraries but all I could find were that of arduino. Than at last I found one by Alexander Lutsai, and I modified it so that it can be used with the STM32 CubeMx

You can see the functions available in the functions tab under ssd1306.c or in the ssd1306.h file. I am going toinitialize the display and print “Hello World !!”…

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:

Horizontal timing signal widths are in units of pixel clocks, while vertical timing signal widths are in units of horizontal scan lines. The HSYNC, VSYNC, pixel clock and not data enable signal polarities can be configured to active high or active low in the LTDC_GCR Global Control Register(not data enable signal must be configured invertedwith respect to the data enable signal in the display datasheet). The datasheet of the panel generally provides the timing parameters for the display:

The LTDC has two layers which can be configured, enabled and disabled independently, each with its own FIFO buffer. Layer order is fixed and layer2 is alway on top of layer1. Layer can be enabled writing the LEN Layer Enable bit in the LTDC_LxCR Layer x Control Register. Each layer gets its data from a framebuffer in memory and the start address is written in LTDC_LxCFBAR Layer x Color Frame Buffer Address Register. The frame buffer contains the display frame data in one of eight configurable pixel format: LTDC_LxPFCR Layer x Pixel Format Configuration Registeris configured to choose the pixel format used to store data into the frame buffer. The available pixel formats are:

Line length parameter is the number of bytes in a line plus three (so the total line length is number of pixels * bits per pixel + 3). These parameters, together with the layer windowing settings, are useful if we want to display part of an image contained in the frame buffer, as I’ll show later.

Some configuration registers are shadowed, meaning their programmed values are stored into shadow registers (not accessible to the programmer) and reloaded into the actual configuration registers based on the configuration of the LTDC_SRCR Shadow Reload Configuration Register: if this register is written with the IMR Immediate Reload bit the registers are reloaded immediately (as soon as the IMR bit is set the registers are reloaded), if the Vertical Blanking Reload bit is written the registers are reloaded with the new values during the vertical blanking period (at the beginning of the first line after the active display area). These bits are set in software and cleared by hardware when shadow registers are reloaded:

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:

Once the image is converted to a byte array the generated header file is included and the array address can be used as the frame buffer starting address in the LTDC_LxCFBAR register. Layer window parameters are configured according to the image size (240 x 320, I rotated the image to fit the display in portrait mode).

The second layer can be enabled as well and its contents drawn on top of layer 1. LTDC can manage transparency using the values in the LTDC_LxCACR Layer x Constant Alpha Configuration Register and LTDC_LxBFCR Layer x Blending Factor Configuration Register: here I used a constant alpha of 255 to obtain a 100% opacity (the value in the constant alpha register is divided by 255 by hardware so for example a value of 128 represents an alpha value of 0.5). Since the layer window is smaller than the display area the default layer background color is set to a transparent black (otherwise the default layer background color is used if the layer window is smaller than the display). The image is 110 x 110 pixels and the pixel format is ARGB8888 (the alpha channel is used to draw transparent pixels). Note that the LTDC_LxCBLR and LTDC_LxCBLNR registers are configured according to the image size: the LTDC always starts fetching data from the address defined in the LTDC_LxCFBAR register. I added the following lines of code to the LTDC_init() function to configure and enable layer 2:

Shadow configuration registers are reloaded each vertical blanking period (after the last line has been drawn) and the code waits for the next frame by polling the VSYNCS flag of the LTDC_CDSR Current Display Status Register, whose bits contain the state of the synchronization signals (high if they’re asserted, no matter the polarity configured). Running the code we get a nice smooth animation:

Double buffer is used when we want the code to write on a frame buffer while another buffer is being read by the LTDC. This avoids corrupting the data being displayed on the screen. The buffers are switched during the vertical blanking period using polling or interrupts.

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:

Now as soon as a frame is done with, calling LTDC_switch_framebuffer() waits for the vertical synchronization period and swaps the buffers. If the code is faster than the display refresh rate (70Hz in our case) it waits for the LTDC to complete drawing the frame.

I do not have an external RAM (screen is 800x480), so I have to use in 8 bit (grayscale or color). But the screen displays color that does not match. And I tried several GUICC_XX.