stm32l4 lcd module free sample

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the alphanumeric LCD 16×2 interfacing with STM32 microcontrollers. Starting with an introduction to the LCD 16×2 display, then how to implement a driver for it on STM32 blue pill board. We’ll set up all the configuration parameters and get our first ECUAL layer driver done, so we can make our next applications more portable. This will be detailed by the end of this tutorial and in the next one, so let’s now get started!

We typically add a 16×2 Alphanumeric LCD to small embedded systems & projects to enhance the user experience and UI of the device/project. You can use it to display text messages to the user, number, etc. Other types of LCDs provide different features such as the number of columns and rows (characters) and maybe colored display, and also different interfaces (parallel, spi, i2c, etc).

For this tutorial, we’ll consider the 16×2 LCD with a 16-pin header interface. Assuming it has the standard Hitachi LCD driver HD44780 controller. The Alphanumeric LCD 16×2 Tutorial did highlight everything you need to know. That’s why I highly recommend that you check it out right now. In order to know, the internals of the LCD driver IC, it’s registers, commands, and how it works and gets initialized, etc.

Today’s tutorial is built upon the previous LCD one, and it’s assumed that you’ve got a basic understanding of the topics discussed earlier. We’ll port the LCD driver in 4-Bit mode to make it easily configurable and portable across most STM32 microcontroller devices.

The best way in my opinion for interfacing alphanumeric LCD screens is using an external I2C LCD driver chip. In this way, you save up a lot of valuable GPIO pins for other uses and it only requires 2 wires on the I2C bus. However, it’s going to be a topic for a future tutorial as we didn’t cover the I2C in STM32 MCUs yet.

Therefore, in this tutorial, we’ll be interfacing the LCD 16×2 display in the 4-bit mode which requires 6 GPIO pins. And as you know the STM32 microcontroller is a 3.3v logic device and the LCD is 5v. But it is not a big deal, as the STM32 output (3.3v) pins will be correctly detected by the LCD (5v) input pins. And the only 5v line that is required is the LCD VDD, and you can supply it from the blue pill board 5v pin.

Don’t also forget to connect the contrast control potentiometer as indicated in the diagram shown above. Low contrast may seem to you like a not-working-LCD and hence unnecessarily waste so much time debugging a code that actually works!

After flashing the code to your microcontroller, the LCD may not work from the USB programmer set up. It’s recommended to un-plug the programmer and use external power supply or USB power bank. The LCD may not work at all from the laptop USB or in some cases misbehave, so stay safe with an external power source.

The STM32 microcontroller has to first initialize the LCD display before it can actually send any characters to be displayed correctly. The initialization procedure is step-by-step indicated in the LCD driver datasheet for both modes 4-bit and 8-bit. And it requires a few delay instructions, so I’ll be using the DWT delay which we’ve developed in the previous tutorial.

The available instructions that the LCD driver IC can execute are listed in the datasheet. As well as the execution time for each instruction. Therefore, you should be careful at this time! you can use an extra pin to read the busy flag bit from the LCD to know whether it did execute the last instruction or not. Otherwise, it’s mandatory to use time delays according to the datasheet specs. Here is a list of the LCD instructions.

I’ve received a lot of questions and suggestions from you since the last LCD tutorial that I’ve published. The conclusion that I’ve settled for is that maybe there are various versions of the LCD modules and drivers ICs that can be the direct reason why the signal’s timing differs from a user to another.

Here I’m speaking about the enable pulse that you should send to the LCD driver after each command in order to transfer the 8-bit CMD word (whether at once or at 2 stages in 4bit mode).

The datasheet says it should be no less than 200nSec. However, an old LCD with me didn’t receive any data until this pulse delay was up to 500uSec (which is so long in fact). Another LCD could work just fine with 50uSec pulses but no less than that. Another one with a different color did work absolutely fine with a 1uSec pulse. Which is pretty reasonable amount of delay.

The LCD 16×2 driver is going to be our first ECUAL (ECU Abstraction Layer), driver. This software layer is added to abstract the hardware dependencies from the application layer. All the onboard ECU peripherals, sensors, memory, and so on do depend on the MCU peripherals and their HAL drivers. The procedure followed by calling some HAL drivers and doing some initialization and calculations work will also get abstracted from the application by introducing the ECUAL layer.

The software component (LCD Driver) in the ECUAL layer will call some HAL_GPIO pin manipulation functions, DWT_Delays, and other HAL & utilities. So that the application code can be more portable, and you can easily change the platform (microcontroller) and have your application running with a high level of portability. And you’ll also have configuration files in each driver to add further adjustability to our software.

The first step is to create the source code directory for the ECUAL layer in which we’ll also create the first driver directory called LCD16x2, and finally create the following 4 files.

The purpose of having these files in our driver is to make it easily configurable by the user (the application programmer). We shall put all the important parameters in there in a structure that encapsulates all the config parameters together. I’ve chosen to put in there the LCD GPIO pins, GPIO port, and the enable pulse width time.

This means that my driver in this way of implementation assumes that the user will hook the LCD pins to the sam MCU port whatever the pin numbers are. But you can actually make it even more portable so that the user can use pins from multiple GPIO ports! but the config structure will be a bit larger and it’s not a big deal however, it’s a design decision that I’ve made and preferred to tell you that I did that for simplicity’s sake and can be adjusted by you if it’s really needed.

Note that the configuration parameter structure is externed to the header file so that in the LCD16x2.c source code we can include the configuration header file LCD16x2_cfg.h and see that global config parameter and do our pin manipulations on these defined ones. This type of configuration is called linking configuration, as it gets resolved during the compilation time in the linking stage and the user (the programmer) doesn’t have to compile the whole project in order to change the configurations, only compile the configuration source and link it with your application object files. This topic and other types of configurations will be discussed in the next tutorial as well.

It is a bit long file 150 lines of code, and it’s found in the download link down below as well as the other files. The thing you need to know about this source code file is that it’s an implementation for all the declared functions in the header file above to initialize the LCD, write char, string, and all other stuff. It’s a direct implementation for what is documented in the LCD datasheet and we’ve previously done it in This LCD tutorial. So it should be easily ported to the STM32 ecosystem.

In this LAB, our goal is to build a system that initializes the LCD driver. Which in turn initialized the configuration-defined GPIO pins and therefore send the initialization commands to the LCD as described in its datasheet. After this, we can easily call the LCD driver functions to set the cursor position, print strings, and shift the entire display on the LCD right and left. It’s a very basic and simple LAB.

The LCD I am using is a 2.8″ TFT LCD with SPI communication. I also have another 16-bit Parallel TFT LCD but it will be another story for another time. For this post, let’s focus on how to display what you want on the 2.8″ LCD. You can find all details about this LCD from this page:http://www.lcdwiki.com/2.8inch_SPI_Module_ILI9341_SKU:MSP2807

First thing first, this LCD use SPI as the main communication protocol with your MCU. For STM32 users, HAL Library has already implemented this protocol which makes this project easier for us. But, a little knowledge about this protocol does not hurt anyone. SPI is short for Serial Peripheral Interface which, aside from two data lines, also has a clock line and select lines to choose between devices you want to communicate with.

This LCD uses ILI9341 as a single-chip SOC driver for a display with a resolution of 240×320. More details can be found in the official document of ILI9341. But the most important thing is that we have to establish astart sequencein order for this LCD to work. The “start sequence” includes many other sequences which are also defined in the datasheet. Each sequence starts when you send a command to ILI9341 and then some parameters to follow up. This sequence is applied for all communication between MCU and ILI9341.

For this project, I recommend using theSystem Workbench for STM32for coding and building the code. After installing and open the program, go to the source code you have just downloaded and double click the.cprojectfile. It will automatically be open in your IDE. Then build the program by right click on the folder you just open (TFTLCD) and chooseBuild Project. Wait for it to finish and upload it to the board by right clicking the folder, choose Run As and then clickAc6 STM32C/C++ Application. And that’s it for running the example.

The most important library for this project is obviously the ILI9341_Driver. This driver is built from the provided source code in the lcdwiki.com page. I only choose the part that we need to use the most in many applications like writing string, displaying image and drawing symbols. Another library from the wiki page is the TOUCH library. Most of the libraries I got from the Internet were not working properly due to some adjustments to the original one.

To draw symbols or even display images, we need a “byte array” of that image or symbol. As an illustration, to display an image from a game called Transistor, I have a “byte array” of that image stored in a file named transistor.h. You can find this file in the link below. Then, I draw each pixel from the image to the LCD by adding the code in the Display_Picture() function in the Display folder.void Display_Picture()

LVDS displays can vary a lot. LVDS displays are not governed by a set of well defined rules like MIPI DSI displays are. Therefore, it is up to the LCD manufacturer and the LVDS display driver IC manufacturer to use LVDS interface as they please, as long as they follow the physical interface and logic levels.

Based on this data, we can pick an LVDS transmitter IC. SN75LVDS84 from Texas Instruments is great for use with LCD displays that can be driven by an STM32.

3. "Volatile Data Storage" and "Volatile Data Storage1" blocks are configured as string buffer, storing string/ message for LCD line2 and line1 respectively.

6. "printf" block, generate formatted string: Value: %1.3f V and store into "Volatile Data Storage" block. %1.3f will replaced with single value from ADC module.

The digital camera interface (DCMI) is a synchronous parallel data bus. It allows easy integration and easy adaptation to specific requirements of an application. The DCMI connects with 8-bit CMOS camera modules and supports a multitude of data formats.

The Digilent Pmod interface is used to connect low frequency, low I/O pin count peripheral modules to host controller boards. There are six-pin and twelve-pin versions of the interface defined. The six-pin version provides four digital I/O signal pins, one power pin and one ground pin. The twelve-pin version provides eight I/O signal pins, two power pins and two ground pins. The signals of the twelve-pin version are arranged so that it provides two of the six-pin interfaces stacked.

The STM32L496 is ultra low power microcontroller with FlexPowerControl and advanced power supply hardware management. Built-in IDD connector allows verify effetcs of using different low power modes.

LCD, or Liquid Crystal Displays, are great choices for many applications. They aren’t that power-hungry, they are available in monochrome or full-color models, and they are available in all shapes and sizes.

Waveshare actually has several round LCD modules, I chose the 1.28-inch model as it was readily available on Amazon. You could probably perform the same experiments using a different module, although you may require a different driver.

Open the Arduino folder. Inside you’ll find quite a few folders, one for each display size that Waveshare supports. As I’m using the 1.28-inch model, I selected theLCD_1inch28folder.

Once you do that, you can open your Arduino IDE and then navigate to that folder. Inside the folder, there is a sketch file namedLCD_1inch28.inowhich you will want to open.

Unfortunately, Waveshare doesn’t offer documentation for this, but you can gather quite a bit of information by reading theLCD_Driver.cppfile, where the functions are somewhat documented.

Here is the hookup for the ESP32 and the GC9A01 display.  As with most ESP32 hookup diagrams, it is important to use the correct GPIO numbers instead of physical pins. The diagram shows the WROVER, so if you are using a different module you’ll need to consult its documentation to ensure that you hook it up properly.

The GC9A01 LCD module is a 1.28-inch round display that is useful for instrumentation and other similar projects. Today we will learn how to use this display with an Arduino Uno and an ESP32.

I am the proud owner of an STM32L476 microcontroller. According to the datasheet (page 41), this specific MCU not only has a built-in LCD controller, but it can also drive an LCD in one of the built-in low-power modes. Problem is, I have no idea how to communicate with the LCD controller! I have scoured this datasheet and managed only to find the controller"s memory address.