adafruit st7735 tft display supplier

Hi guys, welcome to today’s tutorial. Today, we will look on how to use the 1.8″ ST7735  colored TFT display with Arduino. The past few tutorials have been focused on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display extensively but there will be a time when we will need to use a colored display or something bigger with additional features, that’s where the 1.8″ ST7735 TFT display comes in.

The ST7735 TFT display is a 1.8″ display with a resolution of 128×160 pixels and can display a wide range of colors ( full 18-bit color, 262,144 shades!). The display uses the SPI protocol for communication and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer which means it can be used with all kinds of microcontroller and you only need 4 i/o pins. To complement the display, it also comes with an SD card slot on which colored bitmaps can be loaded and easily displayed on the screen.

The schematics for this project is fairly easy as the only thing we will be connecting to the Arduino is the display. Connect the display to the Arduino as shown in the schematics below.

Due to variation in display pin out from different manufacturers and for clarity, the pin connection between the Arduino and the TFT display is mapped out below:

We will use two libraries from Adafruit to help us easily communicate with the LCD. The libraries include the Adafruit GFX library which can be downloaded here and the Adafruit ST7735 Library which can be downloaded here.

We will use two example sketches to demonstrate the use of the ST7735 TFT display. The first example is the lightweight TFT Display text example sketch from the Adafruit TFT examples. It can be accessed by going to examples -> TFT -> Arduino -> TFTDisplaytext. This example displays the analog value of pin A0 on the display. It is one of the easiest examples that can be used to demonstrate the ability of this display.

The second example is the graphics test example from the more capable and heavier Adafruit ST7735 Arduino library. I will explain this particular example as it features the use of the display for diverse purposes including the display of text and “animated” graphics. With the Adafruit ST7735 library installed, this example can be accessed by going to examples -> Adafruit ST7735 library -> graphics test.

Next, we move to the void setup function where we initialize the screen and call different test functions to display certain texts or images.  These functions can be edited to display what you want based on your project needs.

testdrawtext("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur adipiscing ante sed nibh tincidunt feugiat. Maecenas enim massa, fringilla sed malesuada et, malesuada sit amet turpis. Sed porttitor neque ut ante pretium vitae malesuada nunc bibendum. Nullam aliquet ultrices massa eu hendrerit. Ut sed nisi lorem. In vestibulum purus a tortor imperdiet posuere. ", ST7735_WHITE);

Uploading the code to the Arduino board brings a flash of different shapes and text with different colors on the display. I captured one and its shown in the image below.

That’s it for this tutorial guys, what interesting thing are you going to build with this display? Let’s get the conversation started. Feel free to reach me via the comment section if you have any questions as regards this project.

There are a few common TFT display drivers on the electronics hobbyist market, and a handful of libraries that work with them. TFT displays are high resolution and full color, unlike the OLED or ePaper displays mentioned in this repository. Most libraries for color TFT displays implement the usual 24-bit RGB color space, where 0xFF0000 is red, 0x00FF00 is green, and 0x0000FF is blue.

TFT displays can be slow to update. Therefore, it’s sometimes usefil to draw only part of the display at once. Adafruits GFX library includes a Canvas class, which lets you update elements offscreen and then draw them. It doesn’t speed up the display, but it can simplify drawing a subset of the screen. See this example to see it in use. Other libraries don’t include a canvas, but you can draw a filled rectangle over part of the screen and then draw on top of it, as shown in this example for the ILI9225.

Most TFT displays tend to have an SPI interface, with some extra pins, as explained on the main page of this repo. Some displays, like MakerFocus’ 1.3” TFT, do not implement the CS pin. For this board and others like it, initializing them with SPI_MODE3 works.

All of the displays listed below have been tested with the Adafruit_ST7735/ST7789 libraries and the Adafruit_GFX library, with the modifications mentioned below.

MakerFocus 1.3” LCD Display, no MicroSD, Amazon link - This display does not have a CS pin, so it can’t be used with other SPI devices at the same time. It works with the Adafruit_ST7789 library, but you have to change the init() function to include the SPI mode like so:

There’s no standard library for TFT screens, unfortunately. Vendors tend to support the displays they make in their own breakout boards, and not others. As with other types of displays, a well-supported library like the Adafruit libraries makes the display worth more, but limits you to the types of displays that vendor offers. Display manufacturers like Ilitek and Sitronix do not appear to release their own libraries for their displays.

The Adafruit_ST7735/7789 library and Adafruit_GFX library works well with some of the Sitronix boards above. It does not support the DFRobot ST7867S board, however.

The DFRobot_ST7687S library has slow refresh rate on the ST7687S board. It’s unclear whether the issue is the library or the board, however. I have yet to find another library to use with this display, though there are a couple other vendors for the board itself on Amazon. Unfortunately the u8g2 library doesn’t support this display, though it does support many of the Sitronix boards.

The TFT_22_ILI9225 library works with this display, and its methods are well documented. Its graphics API is different than some of the other graphics libraries, and doesn’t implement the Printable API, so you can’t use commands like print() and println() with it. It has its own drawText() method instead, which takes an Arduino String object. It comes with a few built-in fonts, and includes many of the Adafruit GFX fonts, and you can generate your own fonts using the The squix.ch custom font generator. Set the settings to

testdrawtext("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur adipiscing ante sed nibh tincidunt feugiat. Maecenas enim massa, fringilla sed malesuada et, malesuada sit amet turpis. Sed porttitor neque ut ante pretium vitae malesuada nunc bibendum. Nullam aliquet ultrices massa eu hendrerit. Ut sed nisi lorem. In vestibulum purus a tortor imperdiet posuere. ", ST7735_WHITE);

Download each library and unzip the folders. Rename them to "Adafruit_ST7735" and "Adafruit_GFX" and place each folder inside your Arduino Libraries folder. I"ve attached a screenshot of the libraries in the correct folder. Once installed, you are ready to operate the screen! Inside the Adafruit ST7735 library is a file called graphicstest.ino which you can upload to your Arduino and it will run through a number of functions that draw objects to the screen. However, this file will need some altering to adapt the pins to your layout.

Alternatively, you can copy/paste the code below into the Arduino IDE and upload it. This is a modified version of Adafruit"s graphictest.ino, the primary difference being the assignment of pins. I also played with the code a bit to see what kind of functions there are. Let me know if you experience any issues with code. It worked fine for me./***************************************************