arduino tft display menu free sample
In the oscilloscope, signal data is read from Arduino’s pin A5. This data value is mapped to display coordinates. Then the value is used to draw each pixel to create the waveform of the signal
In the RGB Mixer, when a slider is touched, map the touch cordinates to display cordinates. Then draw a black box in the slider’s current position. After that, draw the colour box again with the new display cordinates. Map the display position to a value between 0 and 255 and create the RGB colour combination to show in the top right corner of the screen.
TFT refreshes more quickly response than a monochrome LCD display and shows motion more smoothly. TFT displays use more electricity in driving than monochrome LCD screens, so they not only cost more in the first place, but they are also more expensive to drive tft lcd screen.
The Arduino TFT screen is a backlit TFT LCD screen with a micro SD card slot in the back. You can draw text, images, and shapes to the screen with the TFT library. The screen"s pin layout is designed to easily fit into the socket of an Arduino Esplora and Arduino Robot, but it can be used with any Arduino board.14-Sept-2022
Performance wise LEDs are far better than TFT and LCD displays. LEDs provide high contrast than LCDs/TFTs. In a LED display, you will see perfect black and perfect white which is not able to see in TFT or LCD. LED has a better viewing angle.17-Dec-2020
TFT displays also have a much longer lifespan than AMOLED displays and are available in a far greater range of standard sizes, which can be cut down to fit a space restricted enclosure for a relatively low cost adder.
If you"ve ever used a smartphone, tablet or touch screen computer, you"ve likely used a Thin Film Transistor touch screen. A TFT touch screen is a combination device that includes a TFT LCD display and a touch technology overlay on the screen.
SPI TFT Touch screen and Quad SPI TFT (Serial Peripheral Interface) is a synchronous serial data transfer protocol named by Motorola, . Here two or more serial devices are connected to each other in full-duplex mode. The devices connected to each other are either Master or Slave.
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.12-Oct-2018
In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.
As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.
Here’s the circuit schematic. We will use the GND pin, the digital pins from 8 to 13, as well as the pin number 14. As the 5V pins are already used by the TFT Screen I will use the pin number 13 as VCC, by setting it right away high in the setup section of code.
I will use the UTFT and URTouch libraries made by Henning Karlsen. Here I would like to say thanks to him for the incredible work he has done. The libraries enable really easy use of the TFT Screens, and they work with many different TFT screens sizes, shields and controllers. You can download these libraries from his website, RinkyDinkElectronics.com and also find a lot of demo examples and detailed documentation of how to use them.
After we include the libraries we need to create UTFT and URTouch objects. The parameters of these objects depends on the model of the TFT Screen and Shield and these details can be also found in the documentation of the libraries.
So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.
In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:
In this guide we’re going to show you how you can use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire the display, write text, draw shapes and display images on the screen.
The 1.8 TFT is a colorful display with 128 x 160 color pixels. The display can load images from an SD card – it has an SD card slot at the back. The following figure shows the screen front and back view.
This module uses SPI communication – see the wiring below . To control the display we’ll use the TFT library, which is already included with Arduino IDE 1.0.5 and later.
The TFT display communicates with the Arduino via SPI communication, so you need to include the SPI library on your code. We also use the TFT library to write and draw on the display.
In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.
The 1.8 TFT display can load images from the SD card. To read from the SD card you use the SD library, already included in the Arduino IDE software. Follow the next steps to display an image on the display:
Note: some people find issues with this display when trying to read from the SD card. We don’t know why that happens. In fact, we tested a couple of times and it worked well, and then, when we were about to record to show you the final result, the display didn’t recognized the SD card anymore – we’re not sure if it’s a problem with the SD card holder that doesn’t establish a proper connection with the SD card. However, we are sure these instructions work, because we’ve tested them.
In this guide we’ve shown you how to use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino: display text, draw shapes and display images. You can easily add a nice visual interface to your projects using this display.
With this system you can define menus, submenus, input fields and other iteration objects that deal with all input/output and can call user defined handler as a result of user iteration.
An excellent new compatible library is available which can render TrueType fonts on a TFT screen (or into a sprite). This has been developed by takkaO and is available here. I have been reluctant to support yet another font format but this is an amazing library which is very easy to use. It provides access to compact font files, with fully scaleable anti-aliased glyphs. Left, middle and right justified text can also be printed to the screen. I have added TFT_eSPI specific examples to the OpenFontRender library and tested on RP2040 and ESP32 processors. Here is a demo screen where a single 12kbyte font file binary was used to render fully anti-aliased glyphs of gradually increasing size on a 320x480 TFT screen:
The TFT configuration (user setup) can now be included inside an Arduino IDE sketch providing the instructions in the example Generic->Sketch_with_tft_setup are followed. See ReadMe tab in that sketch for the instructions. If the setup is not in the sketch then the library settings will be used. This means that "per project" configurations are possible without modifying the library setup files. Please note that ALL the other examples in the library will use the library settings unless they are adapted and the "tft_setup.h" header file included. Note: there are issues with this approach, #2007 proposes an alternative method.
Support has been added in v2.4.70 for the RP2040 with 16 bit parallel displays. This has been tested and the screen update performance is very good (4ms to clear 320 x 480 screen with HC8357C). The use of the RP2040 PIO makes it easy to change the write cycle timing for different displays. DMA with 16 bit transfers is also supported.
Smooth fonts can now be rendered direct to the TFT with very little flicker for quickly changing values. This is achieved by a line-by-line and block-by-block update of the glyph area without drawing pixels twice. This is a "breaking" change for some sketches because a new true/false parameter is needed to render the background. The default is false if the parameter is missing, Examples:
New anti-aliased graphics functions to draw lines, wedge shaped lines, circles and rounded rectangles. Examples are included. Examples have also been added to display PNG compressed images (note: requires ~40kbytes RAM).
Frank Boesing has created an extension library for TFT_eSPI that allows a large range of ready-built fonts to be used. Frank"s library (adapted to permit rendering in sprites as well as TFT) can be downloaded here. More than 3300 additional Fonts are available here. The TFT_eSPI_ext library contains examples that demonstrate the use of the fonts.
Users of PowerPoint experienced with running macros may be interested in the pptm sketch generator here, this converts graphics and tables drawn in PowerPoint slides into an Arduino sketch that renders the graphics on a 480x320 TFT. This is based on VB macros created by Kris Kasprzak here.
The RP2040 8 bit parallel interface uses the PIO. The PIO now manages the "setWindow" and "block fill" actions, releasing the processor for other tasks when areas of the screen are being filled with a colour. The PIO can optionally be used for SPI interface displays if #define RP2040_PIO_SPI is put in the setup file. Touch screens and pixel read operations are not supported when the PIO interface is used.
DMA can now be used with the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) when used with both 8 bit parallel and 16 bit colour SPI displays. See "Bouncy_Circles" sketch.
The library now supports the Raspberry Pi Pico with both the official Arduino board package and the one provided by Earle Philhower. The setup file "Setup60_RP2040_ILI9341.h" has been used for tests with an ILI9341 display. At the moment only SPI interface displays have been tested. SPI port 0 is the default but SPI port 1 can be specifed in the setup file if those SPI pins are used.
The library now provides a "viewport" capability. See "Viewport_Demo" and "Viewport_graphicstest" examples. When a viewport is defined graphics will only appear within that window. The coordinate datum by default moves to the top left corner of the viewport, but can optionally remain at top left corner of TFT. The GUIslice library will make use of this feature to speed up the rendering of GUI objects (see #769).
An Arduino IDE compatible graphics and fonts library for 32 bit processors. The library is targeted at 32 bit processors, it has been performance optimised for STM32, ESP8266 and ESP32 types. The library can be loaded using the Arduino IDE"s Library Manager. Direct Memory Access (DMA) can be used with the ESP32, RP2040 and STM32 processors with SPI interface displays to improve rendering performance. DMA with a parallel interface is only supported with the RP2040.
For other processors the generic only SPI interface displays are supported and slower non-optimised standard Arduino SPI functions are used by the library.
"Four wire" SPI and 8 bit parallel interfaces are supported. Due to lack of GPIO pins the 8 bit parallel interface is NOT supported on the ESP8266. 8 bit parallel interface TFTs (e.g. UNO format mcufriend shields) can used with the STM32 Nucleo 64/144 range or the UNO format ESP32 (see below for ESP32).
The library supports some TFT displays designed for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) that are based on a ILI9486 or ST7796 driver chip with a 480 x 320 pixel screen. The ILI9486 RPi display must be of the Waveshare design and use a 16 bit serial interface based on the 74HC04, 74HC4040 and 2 x 74HC4094 logic chips. Note that due to design variations between these displays not all RPi displays will work with this library, so purchasing a RPi display of these types solely for use with this library is not recommended.
A "good" RPi display is the MHS-4.0 inch Display-B type ST7796 which provides good performance. This has a dedicated controller and can be clocked at up to 80MHz with the ESP32 (55MHz with STM32 and 40MHz with ESP8266). The MHS-3.5 inch RPi ILI9486 based display is also supported.
Some displays permit the internal TFT screen RAM to be read, a few of the examples use this feature. The TFT_Screen_Capture example allows full screens to be captured and sent to a PC, this is handy to create program documentation.
The library supports Waveshare 2 and 3 colour ePaper displays using full frame buffers. This addition is relatively immature and thus only one example has been provided.
The library includes a "Sprite" class, this enables flicker free updates of complex graphics. Direct writes to the TFT with graphics functions are still available, so existing sketches do not need to be changed.
The "Animated_dial" example shows how dials can be created using a rotated Sprite for the needle. To run this example the TFT interface must support reading from the screen RAM (not all do). The dial rim and scale is a jpeg image, created using a paint program.
The XPT2046 touch screen controller is supported for SPI based displays only. The SPI bus for the touch controller is shared with the TFT and only an additional chip select line is needed. This support will eventually be deprecated when a suitable touch screen library is available.
The library supports SPI overlap on the ESP8266 so the TFT screen can share MOSI, MISO and SCLK pins with the program FLASH, this frees up GPIO pins for other uses. Only one SPI device can be connected to the FLASH pins and the chips select for the TFT must be on pin D3 (GPIO0).
Configuration of the library font selections, pins used to interface with the TFT and other features is made by editing the User_Setup.h file in the library folder, or by selecting your own configuration in the "User_Setup_Selet,h" file. Fonts and features can easily be enabled/disabled by commenting out lines.
It would be possible to compress the vlw font files but the rendering performance to a TFT is still good when storing the font file(s) in SPIFFS, LittleFS or FLASH arrays.
Anti-aliased fonts can also be drawn over a gradient background with a callback to fetch the background colour of each pixel. This pixel colour can be set by the gradient algorithm or by reading back the TFT screen memory (if reading the display is supported).
The common 8 bit "Mcufriend" shields are supported for the STM Nucleo 64/144 boards and ESP32 UNO style board. The STM32 "Blue/Black Pill" boards can also be used with 8 bit parallel displays.
Unfortunately the typical UNO/mcufriend TFT display board maps LCD_RD, LCD_CS and LCD_RST signals to the ESP32 analogue pins 35, 34 and 36 which are input only. To solve this I linked in the 3 spare pins IO15, IO33 and IO32 by adding wires to the bottom of the board as follows:
If the display board is fitted with a resistance based touch screen then this can be used by performing the modifications described here and the fork of the Adafruit library:
If you load a new copy of TFT_eSPI then it will overwrite your setups if they are kept within the TFT_eSPI folder. One way around this is to create a new folder in your Arduino library folder called "TFT_eSPI_Setups". You then place your custom setup.h files in there. After an upgrade simply edit the User_Setup_Select.h file to point to your custom setup file e.g.:
The library was intended to support only TFT displays but using a Sprite as a 1 bit per pixel screen buffer permits support for the Waveshare 2 and 3 colour SPI ePaper displays. This addition to the library is experimental and only one example is provided. Further examples will be added.
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.
You must add the library and then upload the code. If it is the first time you run an Arduino board, don’t worry. Just follow these steps:Go to www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software of your OS. Install the IDE software as instructed.
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().
First you should convert your image to hex code. Download the software from the following link. if you don’t want to change the settings of the software, you must invert the color of the image and make the image horizontally mirrored and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now add it to the software and convert it. Open the exported file and copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are sizes of image. you can change the color of the image in the last input.
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.
In this template, We added a converted image to code and then used two black and white arcs to create the pointer of volumes. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.
In this template, We added a converted image and use the arc and print function to create this gauge. Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.
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.
Hi guys, welcome to today’s tutorial. Today, we will look on how to use the 1.8″ ST7735 colored TFT display with Arduino. The past few tutorials have been focused on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display extensively but there will be a time when we will need to use a colored display or something bigger with additional features, that’s where the 1.8″ ST7735 TFT display comes in.
The ST7735 TFT display is a 1.8″ display with a resolution of 128×160 pixels and can display a wide range of colors ( full 18-bit color, 262,144 shades!). The display uses the SPI protocol for communication and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer which means it can be used with all kinds of microcontroller and you only need 4 i/o pins. To complement the display, it also comes with an SD card slot on which colored bitmaps can be loaded and easily displayed on the screen.
The schematics for this project is fairly easy as the only thing we will be connecting to the Arduino is the display. Connect the display to the Arduino as shown in the schematics below.
Due to variation in display pin out from different manufacturers and for clarity, the pin connection between the Arduino and the TFT display is mapped out below:
We will use two example sketches to demonstrate the use of the ST7735 TFT display. The first example is the lightweight TFT Display text example sketch from the Adafruit TFT examples. It can be accessed by going to examples -> TFT -> Arduino -> TFTDisplaytext. This example displays the analog value of pin A0 on the display. It is one of the easiest examples that can be used to demonstrate the ability of this display.
The second example is the graphics test example from the more capable and heavier Adafruit ST7735 Arduino library. I will explain this particular example as it features the use of the display for diverse purposes including the display of text and “animated” graphics. With the Adafruit ST7735 library installed, this example can be accessed by going to examples -> Adafruit ST7735 library -> graphics test.
The first thing, as usual, is to include the libraries to be used after which we declare the pins on the Arduino to which our LCD pins are connected to. We also make a slight change to the code setting reset pin as pin 8 and DC pin as pin 9 to match our schematics.
Next, we create an object of the library with the pins to which the LCD is connected on the Arduino as parameters. There are two options for this, feel free to choose the most preferred.
Next, we move to the void setup function where we initialize the screen and call different test functions to display certain texts or images. These functions can be edited to display what you want based on your project needs.
The complete code for this is available under the libraries example on the Arduino IDE. Don’t forget to change the DC and the RESET pin configuration in the code to match the schematics.
Uploading the code to the Arduino board brings a flash of different shapes and text with different colors on the display. I captured one and its shown in the image below.
That’s it for this tutorial guys, what interesting thing are you going to build with this display? Let’s get the conversation started. Feel free to reach me via the comment section if you have any questions as regards this project.
For more information on how to use the Simulink Support Package for Arduino Hardware to run a Simulink model on an Arduino board, see Getting Started with Arduino Hardware.
4. Select Enable code generation for Dashboard blocks and click Launch Display Configuration Setup to launch the wizard to configure the dashboard properties.
Due to memory constraints, the appplication dashboard may not deploy on an Arduino board with less memory than the Arduino Mega 2560 board, such as an Arduino Uno or Arduino Leonardo. To ensure successful deployment of the application dashboard on your Arduino board, consider deploying a dashboard that consists of only a few dashboard elements. For example, you can remove the Display dashboard block to reduce the memory size of the application dashboard.
Arduino Due board does not support the touch screen capability of the Adafruit ILI 9341 Touch TFT display. To try this example on the Arduino Due board, use one of these solutions:
2. Use a custom display that the Arduino Due board supports. Note that you must configure this display in the Display properties section of the Configuration Parameters dialog box.
Implement the dashboard on a custom graphical display. Make sure to appropriately configure the Dashboard properties in the Configuration Parameters dialog box. Use the datasheet for the display to ensure you make the correct connections with your Arduino board.
Implement the dashboard panel on the LCD display of your choice for the Arduino Based Smart Watering of Plants example. Use the Display and Push Button blocks to implement the dashboard.
Our goal for the final project was to provide the ECE 4760 course with an easy to setup and cheap touch screen interface to be used with the Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller. While researching ways to implement this, we found the tutorial for an Arduino-based touch screen provided by LadyAda. The resulting C libraries that we created for our device are based upon the open-source C++ libraries provided in the tutorial.
We opted to display images with an LCD screen rather than using a CRT monitor due to the onboard memory of LCD screens. This means that the entire screen does not need to be refreshed when displaying a new image. This severely reduces the amount of overhead required by the CPU to update the screen.
The only hardware used for this project is the protoboard with an ATmega644 and a TFT LCD with resistive touch screen purchased from Adafruit. The LCD is a 2.8" 320x240 pixel resolution screen with an attached resistive touch screen. A built in linear regulator allows the screen to be used with either 5V or 3.3V logic. The wiring was done using a tutorial from LadyAda. The LCD screen has four control lines, eight data lines, a reset pin, a backlight pin, four pins for the touch screen, VCC and ground. VCC is connected to 5V from the MCU and ground is connected to MCU ground. The backlight should always be on, so it is simply connected to VCC. It is possible to use a PWM signal to dim the backlight, but that was not necessary for this project.
The software for this project is based off of the open-source libraries released by Adafruit. There are three libraries: TFTLCD, TouchScreen, and Adafruit_GFX. These libraries are written for Arduino microcontrollers and are in C++. Converting the libraries to C involved removing the classes and converting all of the functions to static functions. The libraries also contained a large number of Arduino specific functions. These functions were manually replaced with code that performs the same functionality, but that works on the ATmega644. The touch screen libraries were initially using PORTC as inputs to the ADC. However, since the input to the ADC on the ATmega644 is PORTA, this had to be changed. To see the mapping of all of the pins, refer to the hardware section. To make it easier for future students to use, the converted libraries are located in separate C files from the programs we wrote. The TFT LCD and Adafruit_GFX libraries have been combined into a single C file. A few additional functions were added to the libraries. These include the map function which is included in the Arduino software package. This function remaps a number from one range to another. Additional drawing functions added include the ability to draw half a circle and the ability to draw strings instead of individual characters. Comments were also added to the header files to allow the user to quickly understand what a function does and what the appropriate inputs are.
To showcase the capabilities of the touch screen and LCD, three simple programs were written. The first is a simple drawing program based off an example provided with the TFT LCD library. The second is a Tic-Tac-Toe game which allows the player to draw X"s on their turn. The final program is Yellow. Yellow is a simple demonstration that draws its inspiration from the popular arcade game Pac-Man©, created by Namco in 1980.
When the user first turns on the ATmega644 they are presented by the main menu. This menu contains the title, three virtual buttons, and instructions about how to get back to the main menu from each program.
The menu was created by first filling the entire screen black using the fillScreen function. Then three grey boxes are drawn in the middle of the screen to make the "buttons" using the fillRect function. Next, the text is drawn using the drawString function. Once the menu is drawn, the program waits in an infinite while loop for user input. On each iteration of the loop the program gets the x and y position from the touch screen as well as the pressure.
Since we are using a resistive touch screen, a threshold pressure must be used in order to determine if the user is actually touching the screen or if it is just noise. The pressure values we considered were between 250 and 750. When a valid pressure is detected, the program then determines where the user is touching. The x and y values read from the touch screen must first be mapped to the resolution of the LCD to give a useful x-y position. This is done using the map function which is provided by Arduino. The program checks the x and y position against the boundaries of each "button." If the user touches within a "button," then the program calls the function to launch the appropriate program. As indicated by the message at the bottom of the menu, the user can return to the main menu from any program by simply touching the very top of the LCD screen. When the user touches the top of the LCD screen, the running program will detect this touch, return to main and the main menu will be redrawn. The positioning of the text and "buttons" on the menu was determined by estimating the appropriate position given the resolution of the screen and then doing a bit of guess and check positioning.
There are twenty-four different colors the user can choose from. These colors are split into four groups of six colors. When the free draw program starts, the first set of colors is displayed. The currently selected color is indicated by having a white border around it. When the user touches a different color, the pen color changes and the white border is moved to the selected color. The right two buttons on the screen allow the user to scroll between different sets of colors. The buttons are indicated by the "<" and ">" characters. Pressing one of these buttons changes the state which will then redraw the colored squares at the top of the screen to represent the colors available in the selected set. The colors in each set are generically defined at the top of the C file in the format SXCY where X represents the color set (0-3) and Y represents the color number in the set (1-6). Changing a particular color in the set is as simple as changing the defined value.
The screen is capable of displaying great 16-bit colors and offers an excellent resolution of 320x240. The only disappointment with the hardware is the lack of accuracy of the touch screen. If constant pressure is not consistently applied, the touch is not always detected. Playing with the pressure threshold helped, but did not completely fix the issue. Our other complaint is with the speed of the microcontroller. Even with a 20MHz crystal, the ATmega644 was not fast enough to do animation without noticeable flickering. The compiler optimization was required to be OS since we used almost all available space on the microcontroller. Compiling with O0 optimization resulted in over 199% usage of program memory space.
The C++ libraries provided byLadyAdathat were converted for this project are open-source Arduino libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. This license allows for both personal and commercial use of the works so long as appropriate reference is given and that the designed works are released with the same license. By uploading our source code to the ECE 4760 website we have made our code publicly and freely available to anyone who wishes to use it, so long as they give appropriate acknowledgement to us for our work.
In this project we are building a Restauran Menu Ordering System using Arduino. This menu system can be used for ordering food in restaurants along with calling for server/waiter and bill. In this a TFT Display Shield for Arduino UNO is used, it is touch display and has the menu displayed on it. A person can choose the food item and send the order to the kitchen or whatever it is. A buzzer is attached to the kitchen side and goes brrrrrr when any order or command is received. RF Transmitter and Receiver is used for communication. Arduino UNO and Arduino Nano is used.
2. Start connecting the components. If you are new to connecting components in an electronic circuit, then use a Breadboard or you can straight up make connections using Jumper wires but it will create problem when there will be two or more connections needed at one pin (for example two or more different sensors 5V connection to Arduino’s 5V pin). But before soldering components on a PCB or printing a PCB for your circuit, better try using breadboard so that any errors and mistakes can be observed on breadboard and not after soldering. Or do connections in your way.
5. If you know Arduino IDE then straight up copy the code we given and paste it into the Arduino IDE sketch. You will need to manually install few libraries in the Arduino IDE software. Links to the libraries given below in Links section.
6. Connect the Arduino to your Computer/device. Select a proper port, proper Arduino type and whatever other settings are. Here it is Arduino UNO. (If you don’t know what this all is then watch our video: ).
11. On transmitter circuit, a menu will show up on the TFT Display, start choosing the food, calling waiter or bill and check if the buzzer makes sound on the receiver circuit.