make images for 1.8 tft display in stock

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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.

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./***************************************************

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Many times to make any user interface or nicely display content, we use icons/images. In this Instructable, you will be displaying icons or logos or images on your TFT screen from Arduino with using ATmega (microcontroller used in Arduino) Flash memory. It does not require any SD Card to store bitmap images or USB connection to send image data. We will convert images from any image format like .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .png to its hexadecimal equivalent to be stored in flash memory of arduino mega (ATmega2560).

All microcontroller has Flash memory, where the codes are stored permanently. Arduino Mega has comparatively good amount of Flash memory, ie 256 KB of which 8 KB used by bootloader. We will be doing two things:Monochrome icons/images: The icons or images will be displayed with single color, but takes very less memory. Just 1bit for one pixel.

Colored icons/images: It depends on the TFT screen used, for eg. 1.8" SPI TFT with ST7735 driver has 16bit color. Images or icons will just look like your phone screen, but it takes lots of space. it takes 16bits (2bytes) for each pixel (16times more!!).

It requires a TFT screen compatible with arduino, few jumper cables (dupont wires), breadboard and is recommended to use 3.3V -5V level shifters (but it works without it also :P ). But we have used evive . It has all the things required to do this without any additional wiring!! Hence it helps in avoiding the repetitive task for bread-boarding. evive uses the most commonly used 1.8" SPI based TFT (ST7735R driver) having 160px by 128px along with Arduino Mega 2560 R3. Also has internal logic level shifters for ideal usage.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/lcd-image-convert...This tool has all the options for large varieties of screens available. You can even draw your own icon!!.

Also we may need to use some image resizing tool as most of the images available on internet are of very large size as compared to hoscreen. Option for Image Resizer:

If you are using the tool mentioned in last step, Please look at the images. It has lots of options to resize image for our usage. We can easily enter the value of "height" or "width" in pixels!.

Once you have the image ready, next step is to convert the image to some form of numbers as actually all images are represented by array/matrix of numbers. Since we are not going to use SD card to save images or logos or icons as its irritating everytime to have a micro SD card for this purpose, we will now convert images to hexadecimal. Then we will store it in Arduino Flash Memory.

Using the LCD_Image_Converter tool, we will get the image in hexadecimal form.Load the image usign File->Open->"SelectUrImage" If you want to edit image, use the editing tools.

Copy all the numbers!! (Here each pixel is stored in its binary form as image is monochrome. If the pixel is filled, then it will be 1 or else it will be 0)

Other option is to go for colored images (remember that it takes lot of Arduino Flash memory). Based on the TFT screen you will have to select some options like color format (1.8" SPI TFT SR7735R uses 16 bit colors: R5G6B5)Load the image usign File->Open->"SelectUrImage" If you want to edit image, use the editing tools.

Copy all the numbers!! (Here each pixel is stored in a 16bit hexadecimal number. From LSB (lowest significant bit), first 5 represent "blue", then 6 digits represent "green" and rest 5 are for red.)

Case 2: Since there is no direct function in Adafruit GFX library, we will have to write our own code for this. We will have to traverse pixel by pixel to draw image/icon.

This type of icons are very useful for making automation systems having a display bar. Such icons provide intuitiveness to users for your projects or machines.

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.

Digital photo frame are awesome thing to show photos of your family members, friends and your pets. I wanted to build a small, cheap and cute photo frame with the parts already in my hand. This frame use 1.8" Small TFT panel and ESP8266 wireless development environment in a 3D printed case.

This photoframe uses internal flash of ESP8266 module. So you don"t need any external SD Card. You may convert 128x160 pixel photo to C array with LCDimageConverter. ESP8266"s 4MB flash memory is enough to store many photos. You can download software and convert C Array your photos.

The DT018ATFT does not support 4-Wire SPI (also known as "4-line Serial Interface Protocol", 8-bit data, which includes a separate D/C signal line). DT018ATFT does not support this since the signal in ILI9163C datasheet called "SPI4" is hard coded to 0. However, a custom version of the FPC can be tooled to expose the proper 4-Wire SPI signals - please contact us for more details.

The provided display driver example code is designed to work with Microchip, however it is generic enough to work with other micro-controllers. The code includes display reset sequence, initialization and example PutPixel() function.

The display is driven by a ST7735R controller ( ST7735R-specifications.pdf (2.1 MB) ), can be used in a “slow” and a “fast” write mode, and is 3.3V/5V compatible.

Adafruit_ST7735 is the library we need to pair with the graphics library for hardware specific functions of the ST7735 TFT Display/SD-Card controller.

In the file dialog select the downloaded ZIP file and your library will be installed automatically. This will automatically install the library for you (requires Arduino 1.0.5 or newer). Restarting your Arduino software is recommended as it will make the examples visible in the examples menu.

The easiest way to remedy this is by extracting the GitHub ZIP file. Place the files in a directory with the proper library name (Adafruit_GFX, Adafruit_ST7735 or SD) and zip the folder (Adafruit_GFX, Adafruit_ST7735.zip, SD.zip). Now the Arduino software can read and install the library automatically for you.

Basically, besides the obvious backlight, we tell the controller first what we are talking to with the CS pins. CS(TFT) selects data to be for the Display, and CS(SD) to set data for the SD-Card. Data is written to the selected device through SDA (display) or MOSI (SD-Card). Data is read from the SD-Card through MISO.

So when using both display and SD-Card, and utilizing the Adafruit libraries with a SainSmart display, you will need to connect SDA to MOSI, and SCL to SCLK.

As mentioned before, the display has a SLOW and a FAST mode, each serving it’s own purpose. Do some experiments with both speeds to determine which one works for your application. Of course, the need of particular Arduino pins plays a role in this decision as well …

Note: Adafruit displays can have different colored tabs on the transparent label on your display. You might need to adapt your code if your display shows a little odd shift. I noticed that my SainSmart display (gree tab) behaves best with the code for the black tab – try them out to see which one works best for yours.

Low Speed display is about 1/5 of the speed of High Speed display, which makes it only suitable for particular purposes, but at least the SPI pins of the Arduino are available.

After connecting the display in Low Speed configuration, you can load the first example from the Arduino Software (“File” “Example” “Adafruit_ST7735” –  recommend starting with the “graphictest“).

Below the code parts for a LOW SPEED display (pay attention to the highlighted lines) – keep in mind that the names of the pins in the code are based on the Adafruit display:

The SD-Card needs to be FAT-16 or FAT-32 formatted, single partition, and the BMP file needs to be placed in the root (ie. not in a directory or anything like that).

You can name your BMP file “parrot.bmp” or modify the Sketch to have the proper filename (in “spitftbitmap” line 70, and in “soft_spitftbitmap” line 74).

#define SD_CS 4 // Chip select line for SD card#define TFT_CS 10 // Chip select line for TFT display#define TFT_DC 9 // Data/command line for TFT#define TFT_RST 8 // Reset line for TFT (or connect to +5V)

#define SD_CS 4 // Chip select line for SD card#define TFT_CS 10 // Chip select line for TFT display#define TFT_DC 9 // Data/command line for TFT#define TFT_RST 8 // Reset line for TFT (or connect to +5V)

As you have seen before the Adafruit_GFX library (supported by the Adafruit_ST7735 library) makes this easy for us – More information can be found at the GFX Reference page.

To use this in your Arduino Sketch: The first 2 characters represent RED, the second set of two characters is for GREEN and the last 2 characters represent BLUE. Add ‘0x’ in front of each of these hex values when using them (‘0x’ designates a hexadecimal value).

This function is used to indicate what corner of your display is considered (0,0), which in essence rotates the coordinate system 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees.

However, if your application needs your screen sideways, then you’d want to rotate the screen 90 degrees, effectively changing the display from a 128×160 pixel (WxH) screen to a 160×128 pixel display. Valid values are: 0 (0 degrees), 1 (90 degrees), 2 (180 degrees) and 3 (270 degrees).

tft.print("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. ");

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.

I have worked around my issue with the display in a fashion that I didn"t think possible with my lack of knowledge. So, the following is for people who experience the same problem or are just interested in the matter (conclusion at the bottom):

After searching for many, many different ways of describing my problem on Google, I came across this page on the Arduino forums of someone who had a completely different issue. However, Google found some text embedded in some code posted on that particular page (1.8" 128x160 SPI TFT LCD Display white screen - Displays - Arduino Forum), which had nothing to do with that problem, but was helpful for me:

Now I don"t have this particular display, but the description of the problem showed similarities to mine. And there was some sort of solution there as well. However, being the n00b I am, I understood next to nothing. I did give me the insight though, that I should try to make a workaround within the libraries that I will use in my programs. This way, I don"t have to add extra code within the programs to shift the dimensions, and I can also download other programs and run them just fine with my altered libraries.

To make sure my display wasn"t actually defect, I first looked for the option to broaden the resolution specifications, so I could see the pixels work. Instead of the usual 160x128 resolution, I compensated for the deviation with a resolution of 161x130: now all the pixels lit up as they should: no defect.

However, this solution would mean constantly accounting for a weird resolution which would make developing programs much more difficult than needed, since I would have to constantly remind myself of that odd resolution. Plus, there would always be extra columns and rows that recieved some computing, which would limit the speed of the Arduino. So I looked further in the libraries to find the place where the (0,0)-coordinates were defined.

The problem wasn"t actually a problem within the files, so I suspect that there is indeed an alignment issue with my display. But I found the code within it, which I changed so that the starting point of the drawing shifted. After looking through all the libraries within the TFT folder (meaning: the TFT library, AdafruitGFX library and Adafruit ST7735 library) and trying to understand as much as I could, I found the location: within the Adafruit_ST7735.cpp file, there is code of the "Adafruit_ST7735::commonInit(...)" function. This function defines the value of "colstart" and "rowstart" as 0. I changed it to correspond with my deviation.

A TFT display resolution can be configured within Adafruit_ST7735.cpp within the Gcmd[] array within the Adafruit_ST7735::writecommand(...) function. The other arrays in that function can also be configured, but TFT.cpp specifically states that a TFT display is configured according to the Gcmd[] array. I don"t remember if it is necessary, or if I just added the following because I changed, tried and errored so much, but I also added the corresponding values to the "_width" and "_height" within the TFT.cpp file.

The origin of a TFT display can be configured within Adafruit_ST7735.cpp within the "Adafruit_ST7735::commonInit(...)" function. Changing the values of "colstart" and "rowstart" will change the row and column of the origin. By standard, they are both defined as 0 (-> colstart = rowstart = 0;), but writing them as two different definitions makes it possible to set a virtual origin, relative to the misaligned origin of the display.

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