adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

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.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

Adafruit invests time and resources providing this open source code, please support Adafruit and open-source hardware by purchasing products from Adafruit!

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

It only supports 18bit color not 16bit color like the Adafruit. This means it needs to write one extra byte for each color. Or 153600 extra writes for a screen fill.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

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.

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.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

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.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

As an option, you can order this TFT pre-assembled onto a breakout/carrier board. The board allows easy prototyping through its 0.1" headers. You can also include the carrier board in your end product to simplify construction and assembly.

This development kit includes everything needed to get started with the 3.5" EVE module: a 320x240 display mounted on an EVE2 graphically accelerated PCBA, a Seeeduino, an EVE breakout board, jumper wires, USB cable and a ribbon cable. We even assemble this kit and pre-load some demonstration software so that you can have a functioning module in your hands within seconds.

This kit consists of a CFAF320240F-035T a 320x240 3.5" Full Color TFT LCD module mounted on a carrier board (CFA-10074). The carrier board supports a current driver for the LED backlight of the display.

This TFT LCD display module is perfect for the designer who"s looking to have a graphic and audio processor already embedded in the display unit. Powered by an FTDI/BridgeTek FT810 Embedded Video Engine (EVE) graphics accelerator chip, simply send over a few commands via SPI or I2C and the EVE will put your stored image up on the display. Need to draw a line, create dials/knobs/buttons, or rotate an image? Send a handful of bytes and the EVE will take care of it.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (3.5" diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 320x480 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional resistive touch panel with controller XPT2046 attached by default and a optional capacitive touch panel with controller FT6236 attached by default, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen and doesn"t require pressing down on the screen with a stylus and has nice glossy glass cover.

The pin32 (SDO) of 3.5 display module is also used by touch panel or SD card SPI interface, so we must cut off this pin to avoid conflict with the touch panel or SD card.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

This 3.5″ TFT 320×480 + Touchscreen Breakout Board from Adafruit comes with a MicroSD Socket and an HXD8357D controller display that can be used to add a graphical user interface (GUI) to a project. The TFT (thin-film transistor) display has a resolution of 320×480 pixels, which allows it to display detailed images and text. The touchscreen feature allows users to interact with the display by touching the screen. The MicroSD socket can be used to store and access data from a MicroSD card. The HXD8357D controller is responsible for driving the display and handling touch input. This display can be used with a microcontroller or single-board computer to create a GUI for a project or application.

adafruit 3.5 tft lcd free sample

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.