micropython tft display for sale

So you have a nifty display like a bright TFT LCD, Charlieplex LED or NeoPixel matrix powered by MicroPython, but what if you want to draw shapes and graphics on it? Most MicroPython display modules only give you basic pixel drawing commands so it"s difficult to draw graphics yourself pixel by pixel. Luckily there"s a handy new MicroPython graphics module you can use to draw basic shapes and graphics on any pixel-based display! This module shows some of the power of MicroPython--a single module can work with any pixel display because of MicroPython"s dynamic language features. In this guide you"ll learn how to use a MicroPython graphics module to draw basic line, rectangle, circle, and triangle shapes on pixel-based displays like the ILI9341 TFT FeatherWing.

For this guide there"s no special hardware you need to draw graphics on a display. However you do need to have a pixel-based display of some sort (LED, TFT, NeoPixel--anything!) connected to your MicroPython board. Check out the following guides for details on how to use a few pixel displays with MicroPython:

First make sure you are running the latest version of MicroPython for your board. If you"re using the ESP8266 MicroPython port you must be running version

If your board supports USB mass storage, like the SAMD21 MicroPython port, then simply drag the .mpy and other files to the board"s file system (eject the drive and reset the board to make sure it is picked up by MicroPython).

The following section will show how to draw shapes on a ILI9341 TFT display like the TFT FeatherWing. You"ll see how the module can be adpated to draw on any pixel-based display by plugging in a new pixel drawing function too.

Next you"ll need to initialize your display so that you can draw pixels on it. Consult the MicroPython display guides for details on initializing displays.

To use the graphics and shape rendering module you"ll need to import its module and create an instance of the GFX class inside it. For example, to create a graphics renderer for the TFT FeatherWing above you would run:

A pixel drawing function to call when the GFX class needs to write a pixel. For this example the TFT display classpixelfunction is specified. It"s important to note that to use the graphics class youmusthave a function it can call to draw pixels! This function can live anywhere, like as a global function or on a class instance. The function needs to take at least a pixel x position and pixel y position parameter (in that order), and any number of other positional and keyword parameters after them (like color, intensity, etc.).

There are two optional parameters you can specify as keyword arguments too. They aren"t shown in this guide but see how the ILI9341 display example code uses them:

hline- Optionally set hline to a fast horizontal line drawing function for your display. This will improve the speed of drawing certain shapes. The function should take as parameters an x position and y position of the line start, then width of the line in pixels. Any number of optional color or other parameters can follow. If you don"t provide a hline function a slow default implementation that draws pixel by pixel will be used.

vline - Optionally set vline to a fast vertical line drawing function for your display. This will improve the speed of drawing certain shapes, especially filled shapes. The function should take as parameters an x position, y position of the line start, then height of the line in pixels. Any number of optional color or other parameters can follow. If you don"t provide a vline function a slow default implementation that draws pixel by pixel will be used.

Now the fun begins! After creating the GFX class you can call functions to draw shapes on the display. For example, draw a simple line across the entire display with the line function:

That"s all there is to basic shape drawing with the Adafruit MicroPython GFX module! With these basic shape primitives you can start to create interesting graphic projects, like a pong or breakout game using filled rectangles and circles. You can add text with the Adafruit MicroPython bitmap font module too!

Remember any pixel-based display can be used with this library, for example, an OLED display or NeoPixel, Charlieplex LED, or simple LED backpack matrix are great targets to use with the library. Just plug in each module"s pixel function and you"ll be drawing shapes in no time!

This 1.14inch display is equipped with Raspberry Pi RP2040. It supports C/C++ and MicroPython programming language and comes with a 135*240 full color TFT display.

Unfortunately, this device does not use SPI and I have no other choice to use the 8-bit parallel interface. The circuitpython displayio library seems to offer a parallel bus driver but I do not find anything equivalent for micropython.

Since i was able to have this TFT screen running fine witn my ESP32 Devkit (ESP32-WROOM-32 chip) with the arduino framework, I know it uses an ILI9341 parallel bus. I"d really like to have it running with micropython, using the same board.

I am far from being an expert in micropython (and coding in general) and i"m trying to understand the way your driver is working. I see you are using viper code and I guess the purpose is to achieve the pixel operations in a reduced time (I think if not it would take ages to get a drawing/picture).

It uses 4-bit color to minimise the size of the frame buffer because of the relatively large size of the display. The color value has to be expanded to 16 bits at runtime which is time consuming hence the Viper code. You would need to retain this feature. 4-bit color does limit the capabilities of the display: you aren"t going to be able to display pictures, but it works well with my GUI designs which use a limited set of colors.

@peter : Thank you for the hints. I still do not really understand how to rewrite the "write" function. Do you mean I could listen to the command using a scope or a logic analyzer and then cut the SPI sequence in an appropriate way to send it in 8 different parts to the data pins of my TFT using 8 available pins of my board? (-> that"s what "parallel" means, right ?)

Since I"m here, and I have this TFT running with the Arduino framework using the MCUfriend driver, I could listen to all ports using various commands and rewrite everything from scratch, do you think that could be done?

I started coding an IL9341 TFT driver using parallel interface. I did not use the piece of code suggested by peter, but I started from the MCUFriend_kbv driver written in C for the arduino framework, since I had it running on my ESP32 board. This avoid any source of erors since I"m using the exact same board and identical pins. What I do is basically tranlate, one function after another, the methods writen in C into micropython scripts.

Since I have now a logic analyzer (Yes!) I can see that speeds are significantly different between the arduino C driver and the Micropython method. (nanoseconds vs microseconds)

Since I have now an operational method to send commands and data to my TFT, and to received data from it. I"am currently experimenting and understanding the use of the TFT ILI9341 driver datasheet (available here). As you can see, rewriting it all from scratch is just a way to learn, and from there i will play with the speed using different method. I understood that, to use assembly, I will have to change to another board, maybe a pi pico since I ordered one.

Specifications Power supply voltage:3.3V Screen size:1.77inch Resolution:128 * 130 Color:TFT Driver chip:ST7735S Communication method:SPI Interface definition:2.54MM (compatible with pyboard v1.1 interface) Board size:5.0 * 3.6 cm Interface Description pyboard:LCD:lcd pin Y3:D/C:Data / command selection Y4:RST:Reset Y5:CS1:LCD slave select Y6:SCK:SPI interface Y8:MOSI:SPI interface 3.3V:VCC:power supply GND:GND:Ground wire Package Included 1 x 1.77 Inch LCD TFT Display Module 128 * 160

I am new to this forum. I have a raspberry pi model B+, raspberry pi 1, UniPi boards along with one TFT 3.5inch display. I am absolutely new to this coding on LX Terminal, Python. So, I have practically zero idea about how to code Pi with TFT display. Yesterday, I was successful in running GPIO LEDs with a few tutorials on youtube.

Today, I wanted to interface the TFT display with Pi and as a starter I just wanted to print "Hello World" or any text on the display. But for some reason, the tutorials on youtube confused me to no end. Could anyone suggest me a way to do this?

In this tutorial Tony Goodhew explains how to use the basic graphics procedures which are included in the display driver, and for the ambitious makers out there he also provides examples for advanced shapes and graphics!

All the other graphical and text objects we would like to display can be built from this single pixel instruction; such as lines, circles, rectangles, triangles and text strings at different sizes.

This is all carried out with code. Display manufacturers usually supply some of these procedures/methods but leave the rest up to the end user to construct.

At the top of our driver program we will always import a minimal set of libraries using this block at the top of our MicroPython script (we add even more later when we want to do advanced programs):

The third line here imports the Framebuffer library which includes several very useful routines to draw objects on the display. The garbage collection library, gc, has also been imported so that we can check how much memory is available.

Each program contains the screen driver code, sets up the buttons/joystick (if applicable), sets the width and height variables, loads the essential libraries, defines the colour (R, G, B) and clear (c) procedures, then displays some colour checking text like this:

Draw a dark grey rectangle in the centre of the screen. Draw 500 white pixels inside the square, none touching the edge. (Random was explained in the previous display tutorial.)

This is routine is very complicated. It splits the original triangle into two with a horizontal line and then fills them in. If you uncomment all the # lcd.show() lines and sleep instructions it will slow right down and you can see it working (unfortunately, the 2” display needs such a large buffer that there is not enough memory for the filled triangles code):

In the centre of the screen display a ‘bull’s eye’ circular target with a ‘gold’ centre, 4 other colours and scores 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2 written in the appropriate positions.

You may have noticed that on some screens the text is very small and difficult to read. In a following tutorial will add an extra font, with more characters, which we can display in different sizes.

This article was written by Tony Goodhew. Tony is a retired teacher of computing who starting writing code back in 1968 when it was called programming - he started with FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1130! An active Raspberry Pi community member, his main interests now are coding in MicroPython, travelling and photography.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use the 0.96 inch SSD1306 OLED display with an ESP32 or ESP8266 using MicroPython firmware. As an example, we’ll show you how to display a simple ‘Hello, World!’ message. Later, we’ll also show you how to use other useful functions to interact with the OLED display.

To follow this tutorial you need MicroPython firmware installed in your ESP32 or ESP8266 boards. You also need an IDE to write and upload the code to your board. We suggest using Thonny IDE or uPyCraft IDE:

The library to write to the OLED display isn’t part of the standard MicroPython library by default. So, you need to upload the library to your ESP32/ESP8266 board.

After initializing the OLED display, you just need to use the text() function on the oled object to write text. After the text() function, you need to call the show() method to update the OLED.

If you want to display sensor readings and they are stored in int or float variables, they should be converted to a String. To convert the data to a string you can use the str() function:

This quick guide showed you how to use the OLED basic functionalities: write text and draw pixels with the ESP32 and ESP8266 using MicroPython. Now, you can use the OLED in your own projects to display messages, or sensor readings.

If you want to learn more about programming the ESP32 and ESP8266 boards with MicroPython, take a look our eBook: MicroPython Programming with ESP32 and ESP8266.

This post is really only for demonstration purposes but if someone sees value in it and could perhaps have a use for this then we could expand the discussion and talk about some of the things we need to do to display graphics and text. I translated code from the Waveshare web site into a micropython version for the microbit. I have no previous experience with tft displays so if anyone out there has suggestions I am all ears.

The microbit is limited for this kind of application but I am able to display text, numerals and small images, its a little slow but maybe good for a message board or temperature indicator, information that is not changing too rapidly. The example at the following video is the microbit on board light meter.