480x320 tft lcd fritzing free sample

I don’t think inkscape is quirky, I get along with it quite well considering I am a newbie at it. I think the inkscape to Fritzing interaction needs work and I think most of the problems can be solved on the inkscape side of things.

This is slightly misleading in that copper1 is actually under copper0 not silkscreen, but the order should be silkscreen, copper1 with copper0 as a group under copper1 (at present copper1 and copper0 are reversed.) I don’t know of any problem this causes other than Fritzing will prefer to select silkscreen if it is the lowest group (thus a warning rather than an error.)

While this shows as an error (because in schematic it likely is one), in this case it is ignorable, because Fritzing will use the center of the pin as the termination point as was intended. Technically you can and should remove the connectorxterminal elements in breadboard, but it won’t hurt anything. repeats for all the pins on breadboard.

With that done and no major problems, load the part in to Fritzing and test it. This is to catch errors that the script can not (such as a terminalId existing but being in the wrong place). Here is a sketch of a typical test:

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.

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a color touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (3.5" diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlight) and colorful!

480x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display, and double our 2.8" TFT. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.

If you’re still planning on “going it alone” then I suggest having a proper thorough look through the “lcdwiki” to see if the board you’re looking at is there – http://www.lcdwiki.com/Main_Page.  This might make things a lot easier!

MCUFriend TFT library for range of MCUFriend displays which includes support for some ILI9488 based modules: https://github.com/prenticedavid/MCUFRIEND_kbv/blob/master/MCUFRIEND_kbv.cpp

The “TL;DR” version is that to use the display with the widest range of microcontrollers, I’d recommend taking a look at the Arduino_GFX library by “Moon on our Nation” and read the LCD Wiki for more specific details.

I’ve used two devices as there are five signals that need level shifting: MOSI, CLK, CS, DC, RESET.  MISO does not need to be level shifted as this is the “LCD to microcontroller” line, so that is being driven at 3.3V but going into a 5V microcontroller line which is fine.

“the typical Adafruit TFT libraries are designed to work with 16bit color (RGB565), and the ILI9488 can only do 24bit (RGB888) color in 4 wire SPI mode.”

I’ve included the connections for the touchscreen, which largely consist of adding it to the SPI bus and adding two IO pins for the Select and IRQ lines.  I’ve used slightly different IO pins for some of the TFT connections too to make the wiring slightly simpler. The updated wiring for the display is as follows:

Here are some photos of the build process for reference.  I’ve tried to stick to the same colours as the Fritzing diagram (although my “ochre” looks very like my “orange” in places!).

The blue wires complete the links between the level shifters and the TFT header.  Once again, you can see the extra wire to T_IRQ which I remove later! I opted to take one of these underneath, the CLK signal seemed to make more sense that what as shown below.

Now I have a reliable way to actually talk to the display module, I can get on with trying to drive the touchscreen.  If you want to follow along with a solderless breadboard (not recommended – it caused me no end of grief as there are just so many connections) here is an updated Fritzing diagram.

Here we are going to look at creating parts with schematic subparts. The purpose of schematic subparts are to allow elements of a multi element part (such as a dual op amp or a hex inverter) to move around schematic independently. I will use the 74x125 quad tristate buffer as an example of this. We will look only at the schematic svg and the fzp file as they are the only two files that are affected by this. Note that schematic subparts block the use of buses in the same part, I don’t know why and fixing that is a desirable enhancement but at the moment, subparts block the use of buses. First the 74x125.fzpz file so you can load it in to Fritzing and see what it does, and unzip it to get the fzp and schematic svg files that make up the part:

The layout is similar to buses. Each subpart has a label (which needs to match the group id in the svg file) and a list of the connectors that make up the subpart. The connectors can only be in one subpart and as noted the part can not (at present at least) have buses defined. One drawback of subparts is a lot of them (around 10 to 12) in a sketch will start to slow rendering down. Presumably the more subparts present the slower rendering will become. However for some parts (such as logic buffers in this case and dual or quad op amp parts) they are very useful and not that difficult to create once you know how. The FritzingCheckPart.py script understands and will catch configuration errors (in the fzp file only, not the svg so much) to help keep things straight.

Use it for console access or easily pop up X11 onto the PiTFT for a mini monitor, although its rather small at 320x240. Instead, we recommend using PyGame or other SDL-drawing programs to write onto the frame buffer.