mcufriend 2.4 tft lcd shield datasheet made in china

This post explains about how to display text on TFT lcd using arduino uno? TFT which is used in the tutorial is 2.4′ TFT by Mcufriend. It has ST7781 controller in it, Driver code is ST7783. This 2.4 inch TFT Lcd is arduino compatible. It can easily be mounted on an Arduino uno board. This TFT can be interfaced in 32,16 and 8 bit parallel mode. It also supports I2c Mode. In this tutorial i am going to interface it in 8-bit parallel mode with arduino uno.

Project code is below. I am not using any predefined library for displaying text on TFT lcd, I actually didn’t find any library that can properly display text on the TFT i have, all the libraries through which i have gone through were unable to initialize my lcd driver properly. So i decided to first read the driver of the TFT and then write my own code according to the driver supported commands. I first read the TFT Driver. To learn about how to check the TFT Lcd driver just go through this small tutorial.

After reading the driver of TFT i went through its datasheet. The TFT which i have is working with ST7781 controller, it’s a Chinese manufactured TFT by Mcufriend, their website says that the TFT is working on ILI9321 driver but its not. The information on ther website is misleading everyone, I have seen many posts on internet that talks about the Mcufriend TFT Lcd driver. So if you have a TFT and you are unable to find its driver than go through the above tutorial.

The TFT use in project can easily be mounted on any Arduino board. I mounted it on Arduino uno. You can also use any other Arduino board but for that you have to make changes in the code.

Changing the code is not a hard task if you understand the code written below. Coming to the Code. I first initialized the TFT Controlling pins LCD_RST, LCD_CS, LCD_RS, LCD_WR, LCD_RD. In the Setup function I made the Port-D and Port-B of Arduino Uno as output Port. Since the data pins of TFT is interfacing with Port-D and Port-B of Arduino so to write data and commands to TFT we have to declare Port-D and Port-B as output. Then the function InitializeTFT() is initializing the TFT.

In the Loop function i am filling TFT with colours. Colors are filled in Horizontal and vertical directions. According to the data sheet which says you can display text on TFT in eight directions.

The Code above will fill TFT with colors and the code below is displaying text “www.microcontroller-project.com” on TFT. Try to first understand the above code before moving to the code below. Above code is simply a method to fill the pixels of TFT. If you grabbed the process of filling TFT Pixels than you can display any text on lcd by manipulating the pixels.

This note introduces a low-cost Thin Film Transistor (TFT) display to enhance the operation and usefulness of Liquid Crystal Display(LCD) devices. TFT technology controls the pixel element on the glass surface thereby greatly reducing image blurring and improving viewing angles.

The test board chosen for this exercise is the Elegoo Arduino UNO board from the corresponding Super Starter Kit. The kit already has several simple numeric and text displays. The TFT display may perhaps provide better ways to interact in applications.

The controller for the illustrated model of the TFT display is SSD1297.This information is important because the display (owing to its low cost and high popularity) has many different manufacturers who may not leverage the same controller instruction set. The specification of the controller in the coding exercises is examined in the Appendix section of this note.

Of course, the display can be mounted elsewhere and the pins connected to the Arduino directly or indirectly using, for example, a breadboard. Other components can then use the breadboard in lieu of a shield with custom connectors. Of course, without access to such anon-standard or readily available breadboard, it is impossible to illustrate this arrangement in this note.

The output from the diagnostic program, LCD_ID_reading.ino, is shown below:Read Registers on MCUFRIEND UNO shieldcontrollers either read as single 16-bite.g. the ID is at readReg(0)or as a sequence of 8-bit valuesin special locations (first is dummy)reg(0x0000) 97 97ID: ILI9320, ILI9325, ILI9335, ...reg(0x0004) 97 97 97 97Manufacturer IDreg(0x0009) 97 97 97 97 97Status Registerreg(0x000A) 97 97Get Power Modereg(0x000C) 97 97Get Pixel Formatreg(0x0061) 97 97RDID1 HX8347-Greg(0x0062) 97 97RDID2 HX8347-Greg(0x0063) 97 97RDID3 HX8347-Greg(0x0064) 97 97RDID1 HX8347-Areg(0x0065) 97 97RDID2 HX8347-Areg(0x0066) 97 97RDID3 HX8347-Areg(0x0067) 97 97RDID Himax HX8347-Areg(0x0070) 97 97Panel Himax HX8347-Areg(0x00A1) 97 97 97 97 97RD_DDB SSD1963reg(0x00B0) 97 97RGB Interface Signal Controlreg(0x00B4) 97 97Inversion Controlreg(0x00B6) 97 97 97 97 97Display Controlreg(0x00B7) 97 97Entry Mode Setreg(0x00BF) 97 97 97 97 97 97ILI9481, HX8357-Breg(0x00C0) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97Panel Controlreg(0x00C8) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMAreg(0x00CC) 97 97Panel Controlreg(0x00D0) 97 97 97Power Controlreg(0x00D2) 97 97 97 97 97NVM Readreg(0x00D3) 97 97 97 97ILI9341, ILI9488reg(0x00D4) 97 97 97 97Novatek IDreg(0x00DA) 97 97RDID1reg(0x00DB) 97 97RDID2reg(0x00DC) 97 97RDID3reg(0x00E0) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMA-Preg(0x00E1) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97GAMMA-Nreg(0x00EF) 97 97 97 97 97 97ILI9327reg(0x00F2) 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97Adjust Control 2reg(0x00F6) 97 97 97 97Interface Control

I bought four MCU Friend 3.5″ TFT shields.  And, unfortunately, they have spiraled me into a deep, dark place trying to figure out how to use them.  The the documentation consists of a sticker on the antistatic bag, a picture of the shield with a list of 5 different possible LCD drivers, a pinout, and a block of code that supposedly represents the startup code.  The unfortunate part is that none of these have been exactly right – they all have errors.  This article is a description of the journey to figuring out how to use them.

It also has a picture which says the LCD has one of several different controllers (and after digging in I know for a fact that two of mine were made by Raydium and are not on the list)

And finally a table of pins.  Which is interesting as it lists 37 pins when the shield has no where near that number.  And it shows the shield as  16-bit interface which it isnt … and it shows some LEDs which aren’t there either.

I bought 4 different shields.  One came broken.  The other three are all different.  When you look at the boards there are two visibly different configurations

The first thing I did was try to use the MCUFRIEND_kbv library to see if the screens worked.  The first board identified as ID=0x9403 and did not work.  Apparently, the tool just spits out the ID if it doesn’t know it, which it did not.

One of the boards identified as ID=0x6814 worked perfectly, and one had a blue cast to all of the screens.  The crazy part is the two boards that identified as ID=0x6814 had different PCBs.  According to the comments in the MCUFRIEND_kbv.cpp ID=0x6814 is an RM68140 and ID=9403 is unknown.

Next, I started down the path of trying to figure out what the controllers were by using register reads.  David Prentice (the guy who wrote/maintains the MCU Friend_kbv Arduino library) has an absolute ton of responses on the Arduino forum trying to help people figure out what their shield is.  He asks them to post the register report from his example program LCD_ID_readnew which is included as an example in the library.

When you look at these LCD controllers they all have some variant of “Read ID” which responds with 1-6 bytes.  The basic idea of this program is to look at what bytes are returned to try to identify the controller.  Here is an example of what I got when I ran the LCD_ID_readnew program on my shields:

The key thing to see in this output is the register 0x04 which says 54,80,66 which identifies this as a Raydium RM68140 LCD controller.  Here is a snapshot from the data sheet.

After digging some more, I decided that it is super ugly out there, as you find that there are a significant number of LCD controllers that are clones, copies, pirated etc… and that they all present themselves differently.  And, in hindsight I think that this is the reason that my ILI9341 from the previous article doesnt quite work correctly.

And all of this is insane because most of these companies don’t appear to have coherent websites or generally available datasheets.  I suppose that it would help if I spoke and read Chinese.

The next thing that I did was try out the startup code that MCUFriend_kbv generates.  I used the same technique from PSoC 6 + Segger EmWin + MCUFriend 2.4″ Part 1 and spit out the startup bytes.  Here they are:

At this point I have spent a frightening amount of time figuring out how these screens work.  Although it has been a good learning experience, I have generally decided that using unknown displays from China with LCD drivers of questionable origin is not worth the pain of trying to sort out the interface.  Beyond that:

This article takes you through the steps that I went through to figure out the startup sequence for a 2.4″ TFT MCUFriend display (Part 1), and then port it to a PSoC 6 running Segger emWin graphics library (Part 2)

I recently tried out the Cypress CY8CKIT-028-TFT with the PSoC Creator Example Project, CE223726.  This code example builds a project using the Segger EmWin library, its pretty cool.  And, I have been interested in LCDs so I purchased some random LCD shields from eBay, including a rather generic looking 2.4″ TFT from bang good (a generic Chinese reseller).  The entirety of the documentation is silkscreen plus the sticker you see in the picture, which just tells you that it has an ILI9341 LCD driver.

This left me with a number of questions  Starting with, How do you initialize the screen?  Obviously you can find the Ilitech ILI9341 datasheet, but then what?  The datasheet has fifty billion parameters, and not much advice about what to do.  Moreover, after googling around, I discovered that there is an absolute rogues gallery of bad advice about these screens.  Horrible horrible.  Finally, I found an Arduino library called “MCUFRIEND_kbv” that seemed like it was coherent.  So, I installed it and got the screen working – just to prove that it worked.  But I’m still not going to use an Arduino, so I need to port the initialization to my Segger emWin project.

After you have added the Libraries, you can then make a project based on one of the MCUFriend existing examples.  For this test case Ill pick File–>Examples–>MCUFRIEND_kbv–>diagnose_TFT_support

The2.4 inch TFT LCD Shield Touch Screen Module For 2.4 inch TFT LCD display screenhas excellent vivid colour contrast. This Arduino Uno TFT display is big (2.4″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlights) and colourful (18-bit 262,000 different shades). 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control.

As with all Arduino Shields, connecting to the Arduino is simply a matter of plugging the shield in. Take care to align the pins correctly, and ensure the bottom of the shield does not make contact with the Arduino USB port.

1 Adafruit have disabled old model LCD’s support so please install Adafruit_GFX older version 1.5.3 from Sketch--> Include Libraries --> Manage Libraries.

I have one of these TFT LCD shields, but mine is a ILI9335. It has taken me nearly 2 weeks to find a working Library and code for my 9335 driver and I am now setting about creating sketches based around my working Library.

Unfortunately most sellers of these shields (excluding good reputable companies) do not adivise of which Driver is onboard the shield and it becomes difficult to locate a working Library for the driver of the purchased shield.

I changed the Adafruit libraries for TFT: GFX , TFTLCD and TouchScreen. I join all in this one library, the library SPFD5408, to avoid problems with duplicate libraries and enables also have the original library Adafruit ready for use in other projects with another TFT hardware.