160x128 tft display for sale

Here"s a very cool TFT LCD display with 128 x 160 resolution and 18-bit color depth. The most unique feature of the screen is the ability to read back the display memory across the bi-directional data lines. This solves a big problem with most displays - the need for a lot of memory to create effects like transparency or overlapping windows. This is an ideal component to include in your next custom project to advance your embedded hardware/software skills.

The reason that we"re reselling this part rather than using it on a new product is because of a misunderstanding about the interface details. It uses a 3-wire SPI interface with 9-bit transfers. The first bit is used to indicate if the following byte is data or a command. While 9-bit transfers are supported by many modern microcontrollers (like the K66 or STM32 families), making that work with vanilla Arduino is unlikely to happen any time soon. Since SparkFun products need out-of-the-box support for Arduino the interface had to be restricted to bit-banging - just too slow for a display with this resolution!

So we"re handing off this cool part to people willing to stretch their comfort level and move beyond basic Arduino functionality. Using a modern microcontroller of your choice and taking advantage of 9-bit SPI transfers - or a full parallel bus - you can unlock the full power of this display. Not only are we giving this to you at the cost you"d expect from a manufacturer but we"re passing along some of the work we"ve done so far: You can find the mating FPC connector here and some SW/HW work in the documents tab.

In this guide we’re going to show you how you can use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire the display, write text, draw shapes and display images on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT is a colorful display with 128 x 160 color pixels. The display can load images from an SD card – it has an SD card slot at the back. The following figure shows the screen front and back view.

This module uses SPI communication – see the wiring below . To control the display we’ll use the TFT library, which is already included with Arduino IDE 1.0.5 and later.

The TFT display communicates with the Arduino via SPI communication, so you need to include the SPI library on your code. We also use the TFT library to write and draw on the display.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT display can load images from the SD card. To read from the SD card you use the SD library, already included in the Arduino IDE software. Follow the next steps to display an image on the display:

Note: some people find issues with this display when trying to read from the SD card. We don’t know why that happens. In fact, we tested a couple of times and it worked well, and then, when we were about to record to show you the final result, the display didn’t recognized the SD card anymore – we’re not sure if it’s a problem with the SD card holder that doesn’t establish a proper connection with the SD card. However, we are sure these instructions work, because we’ve tested them.

In this guide we’ve shown you how to use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino: display text, draw shapes and display images. You can easily add a nice visual interface to your projects using this display.