tft lcd touch screen library manufacturer

Asia has long dominated the display module TFT LCD manufacturers’ scene. After all, most major display module manufacturers can be found in countries like China, South Korea, Japan, and India.

In this post, we’ll list down 7 best display module TFT LCD manufacturers in the USA. We’ll see why these companies deserve recognition as top players in the American display module industry.

STONE Technologies is a leading display module TFT LCD manufacturer in the world. The company is based in Beijing, China, and has been in operations since 2010. STONE quickly grew to become one of the most trusted display module manufacturers in 14 years.

Now, let’s move on to the list of the best display module manufacturers in the USA. These companies are your best picks if you need to find a display module TFT LCD manufacturer based in the United States:

Planar Systems is a digital display company headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon. It specializes in providing digital display solutions such as LCD video walls and large format LCD displays.

Microtips Technology is a global electronics manufacturer based in Orlando, Florida. The company was established in 1990 and has grown into a strong fixture in the LCD industry.

What makes Microtips a great display module TFT LCD manufacturer in the USA lies in its close ties with all its customers. It does so by establishing a good rapport with its clients starting from the initial product discussions. Microtips manages to keep this exceptional rapport throughout the entire client relationship by:

Displaytech is an American display module TFT LCD manufacturer headquartered in Carlsbad, California. It was founded in 1989 and is part of several companies under the Seacomp group. The company specializes in manufacturing small to medium-sized LCD modules for various devices across all possible industries.

The company also manufactures embedded TFT devices, interface boards, and LCD development boards. Also, Displaytech offers design services for embedded products, display-based PCB assemblies, and turnkey products.

Displaytech makes it easy for clients to create their own customized LCD modules. There is a feature called Design Your Custom LCD Panel found on their site. Clients simply need to input their specifications such as their desired dimensions, LCD configuration, attributes, connector type, operating and storage temperature, and other pertinent information. Clients can then submit this form to Displaytech to get feedback, suggestions, and quotes.

A vast product range, good customization options, and responsive customer service – all these factors make Displaytech among the leading LCD manufacturers in the USA.

Products that Phoenix Display offers include standard, semi-custom, and fully-customized LCD modules. Specifically, these products comprise Phoenix Display’s offerings:

Clients flock to Phoenix Display because of their decades-long experience in the display manufacturing field. The company also combines its technical expertise with its competitive manufacturing capabilities to produce the best possible LCD products for its clients.

True Vision Displays is an American display module TFT LCD manufacturing company located at Cerritos, California. It specializes in LCD display solutions for special applications in modern industries. Most of their clients come from highly-demanding fields such as aerospace, defense, medical, and financial industries.

The company produces several types of TFT LCD products. Most of them are industrial-grade and comes in various resolution types such as VGA, QVGA, XGA, and SXGA. Clients may also select product enclosures for these modules.

All products feature high-bright LCD systems that come from the company’s proprietary low-power LED backlight technology. The modules and screens also come in ruggedized forms perfect for highly-demanding outdoor industrial use.

LXD Incorporated is among the earliest LCD manufacturers in the world. The company was founded in 1968 by James Fergason under the name International Liquid Xtal Company (ILIXCO). Its first headquarters was in Kent, Ohio. At present, LXD is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We’ve listed the top 7 display module TFT LCD manufacturers in the USA. All these companies may not be as well-known as other Asian manufacturers are, but they are equally competent and can deliver high-quality display products according to the client’s specifications. Contact any of them if you need a US-based manufacturer to service your display solutions needs.

We also briefly touched on STONE Technologies, another excellent LCD module manufacturer based in China. Consider partnering with STONE if you want top-of-the-line smart LCD products and you’re not necessarily looking for a US-based manufacturer. STONE will surely provide the right display solution for your needs anywhere you are on the globe.

TFT displays are full color LCDs providing bright, vivid colors with the ability to show quick animations, complex graphics, and custom fonts with different touchscreen options. Available in industry standard sizes and resolutions. These displays come as standard, premium MVA, sunlight readable, or IPS display types with a variety of interface options including HDMI, SPI and LVDS. Our line of TFT modules include a custom PCB that support HDMI interface, audio support or HMI solutions with on-board FTDI Embedded Video Engine (EVE2).

Our new line of 10.1” TFT displays with IPS technology are now available! These 10.1” IPS displays offer three interface options to choose from including RGB, LVDS, and HDMI interface, each with two touchscreen options as capacitive or without a touchscreen.

The new line of 3.5” TFT displays with IPS technology is now available! Three touchscreen options are available: capacitive, resistive, or without a touchscreen.

SainSmart 3.2" TFT LCD Displayis a LCD touch screen module. It has 40pins interface and SD card and Flash reader design. It is a powerful and mutilfunctional module for your project.The Screen include a controller SSD1289, it"s a support 8/16bit data interface , easy to drive by many MCU like STM32 ,AVR and 8051. It is designed with a touch controller in it . The touch IC is ADS7843 , and touch interface is included in the 40 pins breakout. It is the version of product only with touch screen and touch controller.

TFT LCDs are the most popular color displays – the displays in smartphones, tablets, and laptops are actually the TFT LCDs only. There are TFT LCD shields available for Arduino in a variety of sizes like 1.44″, 1.8″, 2.0″, 2.4″, and 2.8″. Arduino is quite a humble machine whenever it comes to process or control graphics. After all, it is a microcontroller platform, and graphical applications usually require much greater processing resources. Still, Arduino is capable enough to control small display units. TFT LCDs are colorful display screens that can host beautiful user interfaces.

Most of the smaller TFT LCD shields can be controlled using the Adafruit TFT LCD library. There is also a larger TFT LCD shield of 3.5 inches, with an ILI9486 8-bit driver.

The Adafruit library does not support the ILI9486 driver. Actually, the Adafruit library is written to control only TFT displays smaller than 3.5 inches. To control the 3.5 inch TFT LCD touch screen, we need another library. This is MCUFRIEND_kbv. The MCUFRIEND_kbv library is, in fact, even easier to use in comparison to the Adafruit TFT LCD library. This library only requires instantiating a TFT object and even does not require specifying pin connections.

TFT LCDs for ArduinoUser interfaces are an essential part of any embedded application. The user interface enables any interaction with the end-user and makes possible the ultimate use of the device. The user interfaces are hosted using a number of devices like seven-segments, character LCDs, graphical LCDs, and full-color TFT LCDs. Out of all these devices, only full-color TFT displays are capable of hosting sophisticated interfaces. A sophisticated user interface may have many data fields to display or may need to host menus and sub-menus or host interactive graphics. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD capable of hosting high-quality images.

Arduino operates at low frequency. That is why it is not possible to render high-definition images or videos with Arduino. However, Arduino can control a small TFT display screen rendering graphically enriched data and commands. By interfacing a TFT LCD touch screen with Arduino, it is possible to render interactive graphics, menus, charts, graphs, and user panels.

Some of the popular full-color TFT LCDs available for Arduino include 3.5″ 480×320 display, 2.8″ 400×200 display, 2.4″ 320×240 display and 1.8″ 220×176 display. A TFT screen of appropriate size and resolution can be selected as per a given application.

If the user interface has only graphical data and commands, Atmega328 Arduino boards can control the display. If the user interface is a large program hosting several menus and/or submenus, Arduino Mega2560 should be preferred to control the TFT display. If the user interface needs to host high-resolution images and motions, ARM core Arduino boards like the DUE should be used to control the TFT display.

MCUFRIEND_kbv libraryAdafruit TFT LCD library supports only small TFT displays. For large TFT display shields like 3.5-inch, 3.6-inch, 3.95-inch, including 2.4-inch and 2.8-inch TFT LCDs, MCUFRIEND_kbv library is useful. This library has been designed to control 28-pin TFT LCD shields for Arduino UNO. It also works with Arduino Mega2560. Apart from UNO and Mega2560, the library also supports LEONARDO, DUE, ZERO, and M0-PRO. It also runs on NUCLEO-F103 and TEENSY3.2 with Sparkfun Adapter. The Mcufriend-style shields tend to have a resistive TouchScreen on A1, 7, A2, 6 but are not always in the same direction rotation. The MCUFRIEND_kbv library can be included in an Arduino sketch from the library manager.

The 3.5-inch TFT LCD shield needs to be plugged atop the Arduino board. The Mcufriend-style shields are designed to fit into all the above-mentioned Arduino boards. The shields have a TFT touch screen that can display colorful images and interfaces and a micro SD card reader to save images and other data. A 3.5-inch TFT LCD touch screen has the following pin diagram.

How project worksThe code fills a rectangle, then draws a rectangle within which text “EEWORLDONLINE” is displayed. Then, lines, circles, rectangles, and squares are drawn on the screen. The project ends with a greeting and a message.

The shield is fully assembled, tested, and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up the library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes!

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.

For this tutorial I composed three examples. The first example is distance measurement using ultrasonic sensor. The output from the sensor, or the distance is printed on the screen and using the touch screen we can select the units, either centimeters or inches.

The third example is a game. Actually it’s a replica of the popular Flappy Bird game for smartphones. We can play the game using the push button or even using the touch screen itself.

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.

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.

Now we need to make the buttons functional so that when we press them they would send us to the appropriate example. In the setup section we set the character ‘0’ to the currentPage variable, which will indicate that we are at the home screen. So if that’s true, and if we press on the screen this if statement would become true and using these lines here we will get the X and Y coordinates where the screen has been pressed. If that’s the area that covers the first button we will call the drawDistanceSensor() custom function which will activate the distance sensor example. Also we will set the character ‘1’ to the variable currentPage which will indicate that we are at the first example. The drawFrame() custom function is used for highlighting the button when it’s pressed. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

So the drawDistanceSensor() custom function needs to be called only once when the button is pressed in order to draw all the graphics of this example in similar way as we described for the home screen. However, the getDistance() custom function needs to be called repeatedly in order to print the latest results of the distance measured by the sensor.

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.

This is our 2.4 inch TFT LCD Display forArduino Uno that will spice up your Arduino project with a touchscreen display shield with built in microSD connection. This TFT display is 2.4″ diagonal with 4 white-LED backlight and 240×320 pixels. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.

Distributor of component LCDs for equipment which provide high-contrast ratio, color saturation, luminance and performance enhancements such as advanced wide viewing (AWV) for true color fidelity, super-high brightness (SHB) and wide temperature range. Focus on industrial, instrumentation, hand-helds, medical and other low-to-medium volume markets. High-bright LED backlights for outdoor use. LVDS interfaces decrease EMI. Factory installed touch screen solutions. 3.5" to 12.1" QVGA, HVGA, VGA, WVGA, SVGA, XGA, WXGA. Also distributes other related products including LED drivers, lamps, indicators, LED assemblies, segment displays, LED mounts, LEDs, and light pipes. Distributor of electronic components, hardware and fasteners and provides design/value engineering support, fulfillment strategies, procurement services and transactional models to meet specific needs and priorities.

In chapter 7, we made use of the segmented LCD display on the Wonder Gecko Starter Kit through the use of a pre-built LCD library and driver when designing the user interface for the sprinkler timer. That made things easy for us, and we didn’t really need to dwell on how the driver worked. In this chapter, we will dig into some of those details so that we can connect the EFM32 to any kind of display we choose.

The display we will be using for this chapter is the Adafruit 2.8” 240x320 TFT LCD Capacitive Touch screen, shown below. We will interface with it over SPI for transferring image data and I2C for reading the touch interface. We will learn how to interface with it with our own drivers and build our own simple graphics libraries, as well.

Segmented Display: We have already worked with the segmented LCD display in chapter 7, also known as a character display. In such a display, there are a fixed matrix of LCD segments that are preconfigured in hardware to convey specific information. They are not flexible enough to display an image, but they don’t require many pins on the MCU and are easier to program. For example, the number “9” can be formed on such a display with as few as 6 signals.

Note that a new “Memory LCD” described in Silicon Labs application note AN0048 couples a memory device within each pixel so that constant refreshing is not necessary, reducing power consumption as well.

Graphical display screens have many different technologies, from passive-matrix Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) or active-matrix Thin Film Transistor (TFT) LCD, Light Emitting Diode (LED), or Organic LED (OLED). Display technology is not the focus of this chapter. No matter which technology you choose, you will still need to understand the topics of this chapter in order to display your images.

A display is a layered device, with each part customizable by the manufacturer. The display is constructed on top of a circuit board which houses the connector and any controller chips that are necessary. The backlight is located on top of the circuit board, with the pixel matrix sitting on top of the backlight. The touch sensor is optional and is located at the top of the stackup.

The LCD pixel matrix is the heart of the display. This part is responsible for displaying the image and, in the case of LCD displays, it will either allow or prevent light from a backlight to pass through. In the case of LED displays, the pixel matrix produces the light and forms the image in one step. No matter the process, the pixel matrix is comprised of an array of pixels in height and width of a certain color depth that make up the display. For the display used in this chapter, the color depth is 18 bits, consisting of 6 bits each for the red/blue/green components of a pixel. That means that the information required to paint the screen one time is 240 bits wide x 320 bits tall x 18 bits of color = 172,800 bytes. That’s a lot of data, and it is more data than we can hold in the RAM of the Wonder Gecko MCU. Therefore, it will require some intelligent code to drive the display or an external memory buffer to store the image data.

The backlight is necessary for TFT LCD displays to allow the display to be seen. Without a backlight, a color TFT LCD will show no image. A monochrome LCD is a little different, since the segments can be seen if they are in the “on” state. The brightness of an LCD screen is sometimes controlled by applying a Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) signal to a pin (or pins) that controls the LED backlight. This is exactly what we have already done in the last chapter to dim an LED.

A display driver chip is used to drive 76,800 signals by rotating through all horizontal and vertical scan lines many times per second. This component is an optional component of the display, and if it is present, it dramatically reduces work for the MCU to display (and continue to display) an image on the screen.

A frame buffer is a block of RAM that holds all of the color information for every pixel (172 kB for this display) that is used to paint a single image (or “frame”) to the display. This buffer is required to exist somewhere in the system because it is used by the display driver chip to refresh the LCD image many times per second.

A touch interface is an optional component and will often have its own control chip or control signals that are separate from the display driver chip.

A resistive touch screen is pressure sensitive. It requires that your finger (or stylus) makes contact with the screen and causes a tiny grid of precisely controlled resistance wires to touch each other, and then measures the resistance to calculate the position. The resistive touch screen requires four signals to interface the MCU, two of which must be fed into an Analog to Digital Comparator (ADC) in order to read the touches. The Wonder Gecko has several ADC inputs that can be used for this purpose. Resistive touch screens may require calibration by the user to perform accurately.

A capacitive touch screen requires no physical contact between the user and the sensor. Therefore, the sensor can be placed beneath hardened glass or plastic. A valid touch is formed by the change in capacitance measured on the sensor. A human finger can change the capacitance of this sensor, whereas a plastic stylus will not produce a change in capacitance. The capacitive touch screen used in this chapter uses a controller that communicates via the I2C interface.

In a general sense, all display architectures require the above control blocks. The display contains a number of scan lines (depending on the resolution) and an image driver that must continually feed the scan control circuitry with pixel data, even for a static image. The pixel control allows light to pass for an instant, and then the pixel goes dark again. If the scan control circuitry were stopped, the display would turn dark, as all pixels would be turned off. Therefore, the image driver needs a frame buffer of memory somewhere in the system to fetch the pixel data that is needed for every scan. The application fills the frame buffer as new drawing operations change what is to be displayed on the screen.

There are displays available on the market (such as the EVE series from FTDI) which go well beyond a display driver chip. They contain the ability to create graphical shapes such as lines, rectangles, and circles, as well as device controls such as windows, sliders, and buttons. These displays can even offer an integrated touch controller and audio capabilities. The displays communicate over I2C or SPI, and the data that is sent is similar to a software Application Programming Interface (API). The specs of such displays define the commands that the controller chip accepts, and the application software simply communicates each graphic primitive one-by-one to the display to paint the appropriate picture on the screen. These types of displays can be easier to program, but are not the focus of this chapter.

At the top of the stack is the application software. Application software is focused on providing a solution to the end user, such as the content of menus, fetching images from flash storage, responding to user input, and generally deciding what to do next. Application software should not have to be bogged down with the simple task of how to write a snippet of text to the screen, or the exact details of how to display an image. These things should be handled further down the stack to keep your application code simple.

In order for your application code to stay focused on its mission, your graphics library should provide useful methods to do common things, such as paint the screen with a color, display text, create lines or shapes, and display graphic images. We will learn how to build a very simple graphics library of our own as part of this chapter.

Depending on the graphics library complexity, it may even create a full windowing capability with sliders or popups and add all of the comforts of a modern computer interface to your embedded application, all within the limited RAM available in an MCU. Silicon Labs provides the Segger emWin graphics library as part of the Simplicity Studio installation. We will introduce the emWin library at the end of this chapter.

At the bottom of the software stack, the device driver is the necessary code that customizes your graphics library for your particular display device architecture and physical hardware connection. (Note that a software device driver is not the same thing as the device driver chip on the physical display.) Graphics libraries are flexible, and can be adapted to many different display architectures, but they need to be configured for your display architecture and MCU. The device driver provides this customization, providing the display’s resolution and color depth, mapping the data bus for the display to GPIO pins on your MCU and setting up the memory for the frame buffer (if applicable).

Add some jazz & pizzazz to your project with a color touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is 2.4" diagonal with a bright (4 white-LED) backlight and it"s colorful! 240x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display.

If you need a larger touchscreen, check out the 2.8" diagonal or 3.5" diagonal TFT breakouts. For a smaller display, see our non-touch 2.2" or 1.8" or 1.44" diagonalTFTs