arduino spi tft display made in china

No, I do not understand why the module does not link all the SPI bus signals on the pcb. It would save 6 external pins. On the other hand, libraries like UTFT and URTouch have no concept of hardware SPI or bus.

In electronics world today, Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Arduino board designs use a variety of microprocessors and controllers. The boards are equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards (‘shields’) or breadboards (for prototyping) and other circuits.

The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, which are also used for loading programs. The microcontrollers can be programmed using the C and C++ programming languages, using a standard API which is also known as the “Arduino language”. In addition to using traditional compiler toolchains, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) and a command line tool developed in Go. It aims to provide a low-cost and easy way for hobbyist and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats and motion detectors.

In order to follow the market tread, Orient Display engineers have developed several Arduino TFT LCD displays and Arduino OLED displays which are favored by hobbyists and professionals.

Although Orient Display provides many standard small size OLED, TN and IPS Arduino TFT displays, custom made solutions are provided with larger size displays or even with capacitive touch panel.

While I was looking for a TFT display for a project with Arduino, I found on several webstores some displays based on the ST7735 chip by Sitronix (datasheet).

Based on its datasheet, the ST7735 chip has a SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) interface, but the pin names on the silk screen of my display “seem” to suggest an I2C interface (SDA, SCL…):

First identify – based on your Arduino board – which pins correspond to the different signals of the SPI bus. For the others, you can freely choose between the remaining pins.

(as you see, I connected the BLK pin directly to Vcc to have the backlight always on. You can also connect it to an Arduino digital pin to be able to control the backlight via software, for example if you need to save power).

Adafruit wrote a fantastic tutorial to explain how to use them, here I only want to show you how to setup the display for the connections I made earler:

If you’re using a board based on the esp32 chip and you need to display bitmap images, give a look to my library, SPIFFS_ImageReader, which perfectly integrates with the ones by Adafruit!

The Graphic LCD screen is a backlit TFT LCD screen with headers. You can draw text, images, and shapes to the screen with the GLCD library. There is an onboard micro-SD card slot on the back of the screen that can, among other things, store bitmap images for the screen to display.