make images for 1.8 tft display pricelist

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.

Electronics has transited from a work meant for well-trained engineers to something which is dabbled into by people in other fields especially in Arts and related fields. The introduction of platforms like Arduino (which was created for reasons like this), has been one of the main facilitators of this trend which has produced diverse forms of electronics embedded art pieces, from interactive paintings to animatronic sculptures. For today’s tutorial, we will build our own work of “art” – a digital Photo Frame. Photoframes are used to display pictures or artworks and are made from wood, metal and several synthetic material. They were created to hold just one picture/artwork but with digital photo frames, you could have more than one picture stored on the photo frame,  switching between them at desired intervals.

Digital Photo frames are usually made up of four main components; a display/screen, a storage device, a microcontroller or microprocessor, and a power supply. For today’s tutorial, we will use the 1.8″ ST7735 based, color TFT as our display and the Arduino nano as the microcontroller. The 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 microcontrollers and you only need 4 IO pins.  The display module also comes with an SD card slot which we will use as the storage device for this project.

Beside just building the digital photo frame, at the end of this tutorial, you would have also learned how to use the SD card slot on the 1.8″ TFT display module for other projects.

The ST7735 1.8″ TFT display is made up of two set of header pins. The first one at the top consists of 4 pins and are used to interface the SD card slot at the back of the display.

The second set of headers below the screen represent the pins for driving the display itself. However, the SD card slot and the display, both use the SPI protocol for communications with the MCU so they will be connected to the same pins on the Arduino nano. The only difference will be the CS/SS pin as each of them will be connected to a different pin.

For this schematic, we used the Fritzing model of the ST7735 1.8″ TFT display and the arrangement of the pins is slightly different from that of our display. This model has the pins of the SD card slot and the display merged together breaking out only their CS/SS pins.

Go over the schematics one more time to be sure everything is as it should be. More on the use of the 1.8″ TFT display was covered in a previous tutorial here.

The images that will be displayed on the TFT has to be in a bitmap format, thus before the images are copied to the SD card, we need to convert them to the recognizable bitmap form. To do this, I used the free Paint.net software (for windows) but you can use any other image editing software.

Load the images into the software one by one and use the resize tool to reduce its resolution and size to that (160×128 pixels) of the 1.8″ TFT display.

The code for this project is a slightly modified version of the SPI TFT bitmap example shipped with the ST7735 library by Adafruit. Thus the code for this tutorial is heavily reliant on the Adafruit ST7735 and GFX libraries.

With this done, we declare the pins of the Arduino to which the CS pins of the SD card slot and the TFT are connected and also create an object of the Adafruit ST7735 library with the declared pins passed on as arguments.

Next is thevoid setup() function. We start by initializing serial communication which will be used to debug our code. After this, we initialize the TFT and the SDcard, setting the rotation of the TFT to landscape (represented by 1).

Next is the void loop function. Here we simply invoke the bmpDraw function for each of the images we will like to display, setting a suitable delay time between each of the pictures. The bmpDraw function makes it super easy to display images on the TFT. All we need to do is to provide the name of the .bmp file, starting coordinates and it will use that information to fetch the image from the SD card and display on the screen.

Ensure your connections are correct, then upload the code to your Arduino.  After a while, you should see the pictures being displayed like a slideshow on the TFT.

The possibilities attached to the concept shared in this tutorial are limitless. You could make the pictures change based on weather, time of the day or gesture.

That’s it for this tutorial. Do let me know if you have any question about it via the comment section. Feel free to also share ideas on cool modifications and additions that could make the project bigger and more useful.

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 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.

The first thing, as usual, is to include the libraries to be used after which we declare the pins on the Arduino to which our LCD pins are connected to. We also make a slight change to the code setting reset pin as pin 8 and DC pin as pin 9 to match our schematics.

Next, we create an object of the library with the pins to which the LCD is connected on the Arduino as parameters. There are two options for this, feel free to choose the most preferred.

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.

All the functions called under the void setup function, perform different functions, some draw lines, some, boxes and text with different font, color and size and they can all be edited to do what your project needs.

The complete code for this is available under the libraries example on the Arduino IDE. Don’t forget to change the DC and the RESET pin configuration in the code to match the schematics.

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.

Since the display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available!

The 1.8" display has 128x160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost "Nokia 6110" and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!). And the LCD will always come with the same driver chip so there"s no worries that your code will not work from one to the other.

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. Adafruit also had a little space so they placed a microSD card holder so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card. The microSD card is not included.

This display breakout also features an 18-pin "EYESPI" standard FPC connector with flip-top connector. You can use an 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable to connect to all the GPIO pins for when you want to skip the soldering.

As of December 30, 2022 - Adafruit have updated this TFT breakout with a EYESPI connector to make cabling easier with an 18-pin FPC. They also used Adafruit Pinguin to make a lovely silkscreen. The board is otherwise the same size, pinout, and functionality.

Adafruit took their popular 1.8" TFT breakout board and remixed it into an Arduino shield complete with microSD card slot and a 5-way joystick navigation switch and three selection buttons! Since the display uses only 4 pins to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used easily to add a display & interface without exhausting the memory or pins.

New! Adafruit have updated this shield to be "Arduino R3" format compatible so you can now use it with any and all Arduinos or Metros - including the Metro M0 or M4, Arduino Mega, Zero, etc. They also use Adafruit seesaw for the TFT backlight, TFT reset, and button inputs - you can query the buttons and joystick over I2C now, so only 2 pins are needed to communicate with all 8 switches.

The 1.8" display has 128x160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost "Nokia 6110" and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!).

The shield has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so its safe to use with 3V or 5V Arduino compatibles. Adafruit also had some space left over so they placed a microSD card holder (so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card), a 5-way navigation switch (left, right, up, down, select) and three tactile buttons marked A BC. The microSD card is not included.

If you just want to display text, shapes, lines, pixels, etc the shield uses the SPI pins (SCK/MOSI/MISO), I2C pins (SDA & SCL) and digital #8. For the microSD card, you"ll also give up Digital #4. This shield works with any Arduino UNO and compatibles, Mega, Zero, etc. If it"s shield compatible, you"re good to go.

Comes as a fully assembled and tested shield with the display, microsd card holder and nav switch as well as a stick of 0.1" header. To finish up and use, you will need to solder on the header onto the shield PCB, a quick 10 minute task.

Display current draw is mostly based on the backlight, with full backlight the current draw is ~100mA, this does not include the SD Card. SD cards can draw 20-100mA based on read/write. Measure current draw in circuit to get precise numbers.

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To interface TFT LCD Display with Arduino, for designing custom HMI TFT LCD Display provide rich colours, detailed images, and bright graphics with their full-colour RGB mode it comes in different pixels 128 x 160 pixels, 320×240 pixels and many more.

In this tutorial, we’ll interface the 1.8 TFT LCD display with Arduino Uno. You’ll learn how to interface the TFT LCD with Arduino to write text on this LCD. This tutorial presents the coding, wiring diagram and components list required for the LCD display.

Creating an interface between the user and the system is very important. This interface can be created by displaying useful data, and menus. There are several components to achieving this. LEDs, 7-segments, OLEDs, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, and the type of user interaction.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. In the case of Arduino, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-colour TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands. This TFT has 128 x 160 pixels. 1.8 TFT display can load images from an SD card. It has an SD card slot at the back. You can see the front and back views of the TFT LCD in the figures below.

TFT is an abbreviation of “Thin Film Transistor”. It has transistors made up of thin films of Amorphous silicon. It serves as a control valve to provide an appropriate voltage onto liquid crystals for individual sub-pixels. The working principle is very simple the TFT LCD composes of many pixels that can emit light of any colour. The desired image achieves by controlling each pixel to display the corresponding colour. In TFT LCD, the backlight technology is generally used. In order to accurately control the colour and brightness of each pixel, it is necessary to install a shutter-like switch after each pixel. When the “blinds” are opened, light can pass through them. When the shutters are closed, light cannot pass through them.

Connect your PC to Arduino and open Arduino IDE. For the very first steps, you can refer to Connecting Windows PC with Arduino tutorial. You can get the .ino code and libraries from my download area with the following link:

This is the section before setup which uses for globe variables defining and libraries additions. TFT.h is the library for TFT LCD Display and uses for writing and drawing on the display. The TFT display communicates with the Arduino via SPI communication, so you need to include the SPI library.

This is the setup section in which Serial.begin(9600) initialize. TFTscreen.begin() is use to initialize the library. TFTscreen.background(0, 0, 0) is use to customize the screen background color here TFTscreen.background(0, 0, 0) means the background colour is black. TFTscreen.setTextSize(2) is use to set the font size.

In the loop section first, we will print the “Hi_peppe8o!” in the centre of the LCD and this will be in three different colours (Red, Green, Blue) you can choose any colour using the different colour codes. After 300 milliseconds a straight line will be displayed, after 300 milliseconds a square will be displayed, after 300 milliseconds a circle will be displayed, and after 300 milliseconds screen will be black/ erase and these all shapes and the text will be repeated in the void loop.

The LCD displays the text of “Hi_peppe80” and after that displays the line, square, and circle and then erases everything after completing this sequence. The command used for clearing all the data is TFTscreen.background(0,0,0):

This is a small graphics library, specifically aimed at ATtiny microcontrollers, for the variety of small colour TFT displays available at low cost from suppliers like Adafruit, AliExpress, or Banggood:

It"s an updated version of my Tiny TFT Graphics Library. This latest version of the library supports both the classic ATtiny processors, such as the ATtiny85, and the new 0-series, 1-series, and 2-series ATtiny processors, such as the ATtiny402. Like the original library it allows you to plot points, draw lines, draw filled rectangles, and plot characters and text with an optional scale factor, in 16-bit colour.

This version adds the ability to plot outline rectanges, and outline and filled circles. I"ve included demo curve-plotting and histogram-plotting programs that adjust to fit any display.

This library supports TFT displays that use an SPI interface and require four pins to drive the display. This leaves one pin free on an 8-pin chip such as the ATtiny85 or ATtiny402. If you need more pins choose a larger chip, such as the ATtiny84 or ATtiny404.

Unlike my Compact TFT Graphics Library which uses standard Arduino SPI calls, this library uses direct I/O pin manipulations. This means that you can use any assignment of pins to the four I/O lines needed by the display, and makes it about twice as fast as one using SPI calls. I"ve also added support for some additional displays, so it now supports 16 different TFT displays.

On the classic ATtiny processors, such as the ATtiny85, the library uses the feature that you can toggle one or more bits in a port by writing to the PINB register; for example, to enable or disable the chip-select signal:

So provided you set all the pins to their disabled state at startup, the display routines can simply toggle the appropriate pins to enable or disable them.

The differences between each family of processors are handled by constants to define the pin assignments, and preprocessor macros to define the bit manipulations. If you use the circuits given below you won"t need to change anything, apart from specifying which display you"re using.

The ClearDisplay() routine has been optimised further by realising that we don"t need to keep setting the mosi bit, since to clear the display it is always zero, so the routine only needs to toggle the sck bit the appropriate number of times. I"m grateful to Thomas Scherer for suggesting this.

This library will work with displays based on the ST7735 which supports a maximum display size of 162x132, or the ST7789 and ILI9340/1 which support a maximum display size of 320x240. It includes parameters for the following colour TFT displays:

* These Adafruit displays conveniently all have the same edge-connector layout, so you can make a prototyping board or PCB that will take any of them, such as my Universal TFT Display Backpack.

Some of the AliExpress displays include a LDO 3.3V regulator, but not logic-level translation, so I recommend only interfacing them to a processor running from 3.3V.

The Adafruit displays all include an LDO 3.3V regulator and logic-level translation, so can be safely interfaced to processors powered from either 5V or 3.3V.

On the AliExpress red 160x128 display you need to connect the backlight pin to Vcc to turn it on. This doesn"t seem to be necessary with the other displays.

The library will probably support other TFT displays that use the same ST7735, ST7789, ILI9340/1 driver chips, but you may need to experiment with the parameters to get the image scaled and centered correctly.

The display needs to be connected to the microcontroller via four I/O lines: MOSI, SCK, CS, and DC. You can use any pins for these, but they should all be in the same port. You need to specify the port pin numbers of the pins you are using at the start of the Tiny TFT Graphics Library listing.

The 33kΩ pullup resistor from the display"s CS pin is optional; it is only needed on the AliExpress displays, and holds the chip select high to prevent the display from flickering while programming the ATtiny85.

The different displays are catered for by seven constants which specify the size of the display, the offsets relative to the area supported by the display driver, whether the display is inverted, the rotation value, and the order of the colours; for example:

By default the parameters give the correct orientation assuming you"re using the display with the header pins along the top, except in the case of the larger displays which have the header pins along the shorter edge, in which case the header pins are assumed to be on the left.

To check or adjust the values for each display you can run the TestChart() program, which draws a one-pixel border around the display area, and plots a red "F" to show the orientation:

The library will probably support other TFT displays that use the same driver chips, but you may need to experiment with the parameters to get the image scaled and centered correctly.

The foreground and background colours are defined by the two global variables fore and back. Initially these are set to White (0xFFFF) and Black (0) respectively:

The library includes basic graphics routines for plotting points and drawing lines. These work on a conventional coordinate system with the origin at lower left. For example, on the 80x160 display:

DrawRect() draws an outline rectangle andFillRect() draws a filled rectangle in the foreground colour with width w and height h, and the bottom left corner at the current drawing position:

DrawCircle() draws an outline circle andFillCircle() draws a filled circle in the foreground colour with radius radius, and the centre at the current drawing position:

You can plot larger characters by setting the global variable scale, default value 1. After plotting a character PlotChar() moves the drawing position to the start of the next character to make it easy to plot several characters in a row without needing to call MoveTo().

By default the ATtiny85 runs at 1MHz. Choose Burn Bootloader to set the fuses for 8MHz operation, or your graphics will run rather slowly, then upload the program using an ISP (in-system programming) programmer such as Sparkfun"s Tiny AVR Programmer Board

ER-TFTM018-2 is 128x160 dots 1.8" color tft lcd display with ILI9163 controller and breakoutboard,optional power supply for 3.3V or 5V and optional 4-wire resistive touch panel,superior display quality,super wide viewing angle and easily controlled by MCU such as 8051, PIC, AVR, ARDUINO,ARM and Raspberry PI.It can be used in any embedded systems,industrial device,security and hand-held equipment which requires display in high quality and colorful image.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!".Here is the link for1.8"TFT LCD Shield with Libraries, EXxamples.Schematic Diagram for Arduino Due,Mega 2560 and Uno. For 8051 microcontroller user,we prepared the detailed tutorial such as interfacing, demo code andDevelopment Kitat the bottom of this page.

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You do need to use the modified QDTECH library and the Adafruit libraries installed but the below is what I have working for SD card access which was the hardest part for me.

While trying to get some 1.8" generic TFT displays to work I discovered many others had been frustrated by this problem in the past as well. It is compounded by the fact that there are at least two controllers in use (ST7735 and S6D02A1) and the only way to figure out which you have is trial-and-error, which is made difficult by the confusing way the pins are marked.

After a couple of hours of staring at a blank screen I discovered that the SPI clock signal needed to go to the pin marked SCL, not SCK as many had thought. This allowed the Adafruit Graphics Test example to run, proving my board has the S7735 controller. It also made more sense after looking at pics of a bunch of other 1.8" displays which have different PC layouts but some of which identify how one group of pins is used for the SD card (which usually have industry-standard SPI designations) and the group used for the display (which is SPI but has markings more like I2C). I have no idea why the makers of these displays used such goofy markings or why some have an extra 8 pin header, but I suspect if you wire up the pins in the sequence shown regardless of what may be printed on the PC board, it will work.

A couple of notes specific to using these displays with Teensy as I want to do: the Adafruit wiring won"t work with the Audio board attached due to a hardware conflict with a couple of pins, but if the regulator on the display is jumpered everything works fine on 3.3V, including the LED backlight.

Recently, I had the idea to make a digital picture frame—one of these kinds which load images from SD cards and show each image for some time. I was remembering myself that I already own a small TFT display, the KMR-1.8 SPI, that works out of the box with an Arduino Uno. When I digged up my KMR-1.8 SPI, I realized that it has also an in-built SD card reader. Moreover, I looked up the Internet and found ready-to-use libraries for the in-built SD card reader as well as showing images on the TFT display. For these reasons, I thought making such an digital picture frame will turn out very easy.

When I started to implement my first lines of codes and started to connect my Arduino Uno to the KMR-1.8 SPI, I ran into two major problems. First, the colors of my image file did not match to the colors displayed by the KMR-1.8 (red and blue were interchanged). Second, my first prototypes stopped to work after about 5 minutes. The application started to freeze and showed the same image forever instead of displaying the next image after a chosen time.

I did some research on the Internet and I found out that many people ran into similar problems. The second problem seemed to be caused by some memory leaks in the code. Nevertheless, I did not came across any example code that worked out of the box for my setup. Therefore, I want to share how I made it work.

There exists various versions of so-called “1.8 TFT displays” from different manufacturers. Not all of them are 100% compatible to each other. Therefore, if you own a TFT display and want to use my tutorial to make it work, please check if your TFT display really matches the version I used in this tutorial:

The source code relies on three header files (and libraries): SPI.h (Link), SD.h (Link) and TFT.h (Link). Please make sure that all of them are correctly installed before trying out my source code (In Arduino IDE: Tools -> Manage Libraries…).

I overcame the first problem by not using the default initialization method (“TFTscreen.begin();”) of the TFT library. Instead, I looked up whats inside the “begin”-method. I found a method called “initR” which has a parameter that allows to perform the initialization for a specific chip. Here, the parameter value “INITR_BLACKTAB” worked for me as the colors were then shown correctly. In addition, I call the method “setRotation” with parameter value “1” in order to be conform to the default initialization method. In the end, the code for the setting up the TFT library object looks like this:// ...

I solved the second problem (application freezes after some time) by avoiding any possible memory leak, i.e. to “free” every bit of memory that was reserved before as soon as it is not needed anymore. Therefore, you will find a lot of “close”-method calls as well as some weird string handling. When I wrote the code, I thought I could simplify a few things. However, the memory leak problems came back. So, the code might look weird but it works :)

The code looks for image files (*.BMP) on the SD card and shows each image for 60 seconds. You can change the display time by setting “DELAY_IMAGE_SWAP” to a new value.

Important Note: The image files on the SD card must be stored as BMP with a resolution of 160x128 pixels (width x height). Moreover, long file names and special characters must be avoided.