interface tft lcd with arduino quotation

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.

The next example is controlling an RGB LED using these three RGB sliders. For example if we start to slide the blue slider, the LED will light up in blue and increase the light as we would go to the maximum value. So the sliders can move from 0 to 255 and with their combination we can set any color to the RGB LED,  but just keep in mind that the LED cannot represent the colors that much accurate.

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.

As the code is a bit longer and for better understanding I will post the source code of the program in sections with description for each section. And at the end of this article I will post the complete source 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.

Next we need to define the fonts that are coming with the libraries and also define some variables needed for the program. In the setup section we need to initiate the screen and the touch, define the pin modes for the connected sensor, the led and the button, and initially call the drawHomeSreen() custom function, which will draw the home screen of the program.

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.

Next is the distance sensor button. First we need to set the color and then using the fillRoundRect() function we will draw the rounded rectangle. Then we will set the color back to white and using the drawRoundRect() function we will draw another rounded rectangle on top of the previous one, but this one will be without a fill so the overall appearance of the button looks like it has a frame. On top of the button we will print the text using the big font and the same background color as the fill of the button. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

Here’s that function which uses the ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance and print the values with SevenSegNum font in green color, either in centimeters or inches. If you need more details how the ultrasonic sensor works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. Back in the loop section we can see what happens when we press the select unit buttons as well as the back button.

Ok next is the RGB LED Control example. If we press the second button, the drawLedControl() custom function will be called only once for drawing the graphic of that example and the setLedColor() custom function will be repeatedly called. In this function we use the touch screen to set the values of the 3 sliders from 0 to 255. With the if statements we confine the area of each slider and get the X value of the slider. So the values of the X coordinate of each slider are from 38 to 310 pixels and we need to map these values into values from 0 to 255 which will be used as a PWM signal for lighting up the LED. If you need more details how the RGB LED works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. The rest of the code in this custom function is for drawing the sliders. Back in the loop section we only have the back button which also turns off the LED when pressed.

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:

were missing for my display (hailege, 2,8 tft, spi, il9431, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B07YTWRZGR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). so it might just be that the led backlight isnt being turned on. but of course the tip might not help with the st7796s.

// https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/3-2-TFT-LCD-Display-module-Touch-Screen-Shield-board-onboard-temperature-sensor-w-Touch-Pen/1199788_32755473754.html?spm=2114.12010615.0.0.bXDdc3

// https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/OPEN-SMART-5V-3-3V-Compatible-UNO-R3-CH340G-ATMEGA328P-Development-Board-with-USB-Cable-for/1199788_32758607490.html?spm=2114.12010615.0.0.ckMTaN

Let"s get started with this creative Arduino project, where you"ll learn about the TFT LCD touch screen and how to use it to create your own colourful calculator. For a basic understanding of touch screen & LCD, a cheap TFT 2.4" Arduino shield is used to create this project. For creating a similar project, one should follow the steps and edit the code for better understanding.

The shield connects ILI9341"s data pins 0-7 to Arduino"s digital pins 2-8 (allowing parallel communication, not SPI. ILI9341"s RESET goes to Arduino analog pin A4. CS (chip select) to A3. RS (CD command/data) to A2. WR and RD to A1 and A0.

ILI9341 is integrated inside the display. It drives the display and has nothing to do with the touchscreen (Although the shield connects some pins of ILI9341 together with pins of the touchscreen).

Now, open Arduino IDE and select Sketch -> Include Library -> Add .ZIP library. A browser window will open navigate to the ZIP file and click “OK”. You should notice “Library added to your Libraries” on the bottom-left corner of Arduino, if successful.

You can also find an SD card slot at the bottom of the module shown above, which can be used to load an SD card with BMP image files, and these images can be displayed on our TFT LCD screen using the Arduino Program.

The 2.4” TFT LCD screen is a perfect Arduino Shield. You can directly push the LCD screen on top of the Arduino Uno and it will perfectly match with the pins and slid in through. However, as matters of safety cover the programming terminal of your Arduino UNO with some insulator, just in case if the terminal comes in contact with your TFT LCD screen.

※Controller IC Replacement NoticeDue to the global shortage of IC, the controller RA8876 used in this module has been difficult to purchase. In order not to affect the delivery, we will use the controller LT7683 as replacement which is fully compatible with the same stable performance when the RA8876 is out of stock. (Oct-28-2021)

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (10.1" diagonal) bright (24 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 1024x600 pixels with individual pixel control,optional 10.1 inch capacitive touch panel.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any Arduino Due board.

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

※Controller IC Replacement NoticeDue to the global shortage of IC, the controller RA8876 used in this module has been difficult to purchase. In order not to affect the delivery, we will use the controller LT7683 as replacement which is fully compatible with the same stable performance when the RA8876 is out of stock. (Oct-28-2021)

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (10.1" diagonal) bright (24 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 1024x600 pixels with individual pixel control,optional 10.1 inch capacitive touch panel.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any Arduino Due board.

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (5" diagonal) bright (12 white-LED backlight) and colorfu 480x272 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional resistive touch panel attached on screen by default.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (UNO/Due/Mega 2560).

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. We also have a touch screen library that detects x,y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

For 5 inch screen,the high current is needed.But the current of arduino uno or arduino mega board is low, an external 5V power supply is needed. Refer to the image shows the external power supply position on shield ER-AS-RA8875.

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

This module is designed to plug directly into Arduino UNO R3 (or its clone) boards. It is compatible with CH340 and Atmega16u2 version boards, as well as Mega 2560. This LCD shield may also work with other boards, but the compatibility can"t be guaranteed.

Displays are one of the best ways to provide feedback to users of a particular device or project and often the bigger the display, the better. For today’s tutorial, we will look on how to use the relatively big, low cost, ILI9481 based, 3.5″ Color TFT display with Arduino.

This 3.5″ color TFT display as mentioned above, is based on the ILI9481 TFT display driver. The module offers a resolution of 480×320 pixels and comes with an SD card slot through which an SD card loaded with graphics and UI can be attached to the display. The module is also pre-soldered with pins for easy mount (like a shield) on either of the Arduino Mega and Uno, which is nice since there are not many big TFT displays that work with the Arduino Uno.

The module is compatible with either of the Arduino Uno or the Arduino Mega, so feel free to choose between them or test with both. As usual, these components can be bought via the links attached to them.

One of the good things about this module is the ease with which it can be connected to either of the Arduino Mega or Uno. For this tutorial, we will use the Arduino Uno, since the module comes as a shield with pins soldered to match the Uno’s pinout. All we need to do is snap it onto the top of the Arduino Uno as shown in the image below, thus no wiring required.

This ease of using the module mentioned above is, however, one of the few downsides of the display. If we do not use the attached SD card slot, we will be left with 6 digital and one analog pin as the module use the majority of the Arduino pins. When we use the SD card part of the display, we will be left with just 2 digital and one analog pin which at times limits the kind of project in which we can use this display. This is one of the reasons while the compatibility of this display with the Arduino Mega is such a good news, as the “Mega” offers more digital and analog pins to work with, so when you need extra pins, and size is not an issue, use the Mega.

To easily write code to use this display, we will use the GFX and TFT LCD libraries from “Adafruit” which can be downloaded here. With the library installed we can easily navigate through the examples that come with it and upload them to our setup to see the display in action. By studying these examples, one could easily learn how to use this display. However, I have compiled some of the most important functions for the display of text and graphics into an Arduino sketch for the sake of this tutorial. The complete sketch is attached in a zip file under the download section of this tutorial.

As usual, we will do a quick run through of the code and we start by including the libraries which we will use for the project, in this case, the Adafruit GFX and TFT LCD libraries.

With this done, the Void Setup() function is next. We start the function by issuing atft.reset() command to reset the LCD to default configurations. Next, we specify the type of the LCD we are using via the LCD.begin function and set the rotation of the TFT as desired. We proceed to fill the screen with different colors and display different kind of text using diverse color (via the tft.SetTextColor() function) and font size (via the tft.setTextSize() function).

The Adafruit library helps reduce the amount of work one needs to do while developing the code for this display, leaving the quality of the user interface to the limitations of the creativity and imagination of the person writing the code.

Arduino shields are meant to extend the capabilities of the Arduino, while also making initial development of a new device much easier for the user. In this case, our NHD-FT81x-SHIELD provides seamless connectivity and direct software compatibility for the user with any of our EVE2 TFT Modules and an Arduino. This shield has built-in logic level shifting, an on-board buck switching regulator, an audio power amplifier, and a microSD card reader for expandable data storage.

Enhance your user experience with capacitive or resistive touch screen technology. We’ll adjust the glass thickness or shape of the touch panel so it’s a perfect fit for your design.

Choose from a wide selection of interface options or talk to our experts to select the best one for your project. We can incorporate HDMI, USB, SPI, VGA and more into your display to achieve your design goals.

Equip your display with a custom cut cover glass to improve durability. Choose from a variety of cover glass thicknesses and get optical bonding to protect against moisture and debris.

3.5 inch SPI Interface 480x320 TFT Touch Screen Display for Arduino is big (3.5″ diagonal) bright and colorful! 480×320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display, and double our 2.8″ TFT.

As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen sensor allowing you to control your application simply by touching any area of the screen. This display has a controller built into it with RAM buffering so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller.

The first part of this three-part series discussed common touchscreen technologies and their typical use-cases. Then, the second part investigated a few readily available and affordable touch display options for makers and hobbyists. This article documents how to get started with one of the recommended Arduino-compatible 2.8” resistive touchscreens from part two.

The TFT display I use contains a resistive overlay, which allows users to control an Arduino-based project with touch inputs. The display controller that comes with the touchscreen supports a few different communication methods. However, I’ll only outline two of them as I find these to be the most useful. The first method uses eight parallel communication lines to transmit pixel data from the Arduino to the display. I recommend using this method in multimedia applications where the Arduino needs to transfer a lot of pixel data.

The second method involves using SPI to communicate with the display controller. Doing so saves a few digital I/O lines with the tradeoff of being slower than the parallel communication method. To enable the display’s SPI mode, you have to close these three solder pad jumpers on the bottom side of the board:

Note that I used the SPI method to send data from the Arduino to the display. Either way, in addition to the pixel data lines, you’ll further need to employ two additional digital I/O lines and two more analog pins of the Arduino if you want to add resistive touch detection to your project. In addition, this touchscreen module comes with a built-in micro SD card reader I won’t discuss further in this article.

You have to install two libraries before you can send image data to the TFT display. First, use the Arduino IDE’s built-in library manager to download the Adafruit ILI9341 library. This package handles low-level communication between the Arduino and the display controller IC. Then, download the Adafruit_GFX library. The second library contains helpful code for drawing graphics primitives such as simple shapes and text. I recommend you read this article if you don’t know how to use the library manager in the Arduino IDE.

This short test program first initializes the TFT display in the setup()-function. Then, I defined a few helper methods. The resetAndClearScreen()-method resets the display’s rotation and erases all previously drawn pixels. The next function is drawIntroText(). It prints a short status message in the top left corner of the display. Lastly, drawTouchButton() creates a rectangle at the specified position with the given width and height. Then, the method places a string at the center of the previously drawn rectangle. As the name suggests, I’ll later use these rectangles to detect user inputs. The loop()-method refreshes the screen twice a second. But because there’s no interactivity built into the program yet, users can’t change what the screen displays at this point.

To use the resistive touch capabilities of this display, download the Adafruit_TouchScreen library using the Arduino IDE’s built-in library manager. The example code from above prints a few lines of text and then draws two touch buttons. Next, we’ll have to detect when a user presses one of the buttons. If that happens, the Arduino should refresh the screen and draw all the components using different colors. Therefore, I added the following method to detect whether a user touched one of the buttons:

The touchedWithin()-function is easy to understand. The first parameter represents the coordinates of the detected input. Then, the helper method checks whether these x and y coordinates are within the button’s dimensions.

Before making the previously discussed calls to the various draw-functions, the loop() method also checks whether the user touched the resistive screen. The TSPoint class contains a z-value we can use to determine how hard a user pressed down on the screen. This z-value is also perfect for preventing the Arduino from detecting unwanted inputs. If the z-value is greater than a fixed threshold value, the Arduino detects a touch input. The code then calls the touchedWithin()-function to determine whether the user pressed one of the buttons.

Arduino-compatible touchscreens allow you to quickly add a touchscreen to your existing or new DIY projects. Simple-to-use libraries let you get the display up and running in practically no time. The screen I used offers a few ways for devices to send pixel data to it. A parallel interface allows you to achieve higher screen refresh rates, which might be essential in multimedia applications. The parallel interface is also perfect for MCUs with a large number of I/O pins. The SPI method, on the other hand, is a bit slower compared to parallel communication. It, however, allows you to cut down on the number of required I/O pins, which is the preferred option in most Arduino projects.