3d printer tft lcd setup manufacturer

I was rebuilding one of my 3D printers — again — and decided I needed a display upgrade. A color screen is nice, but there are some limitations. I also found there are ways around these limitations, so I wanted to share my thoughts on a dual-mode color touch screen LCD controller for your 3D printer. The screen in question is a TFT35 from BigTree Tech. It is similar to an MKS screen, but it can operate in two different modes, as you will see.

A few years ago, I picked up an Anet A8 which was very inexpensive, especially on sale. Not the best printer, though, because it has that cheap acrylic frame. No problem. A box full of aluminum extrusion later, the printer was reborn. Over time, I’ve completely reworked the extrusion system and the Y-axis, leaving only the motors, bearings, and the controller/display as the original.

That last part was what bothered me. The Anet board is actually pretty capable for a small cheap board. But it is just what the printer needs and nothing more. If you wanted to hack the printer there was very little memory left and only one spare pin for I/O. So it was time to replace the board and why not the controller, too?

The A8 has an LCD2004. That means it has a 20×4 LCD. Instead of an encoder knob, there are five buttons: basically up, down, left, right, and enter. Most printers now have an LCD12864 which, as you can probably guess, is a 128×64 LCD and they use an encoder knob for direction that you can push for the enter key.

I happened to have one of these lying around so when I installed a new motherboard — a Fysetc Spider if you are curious — I also wired in the new LCD. I had to recompile Marlin, of course, but that’s easy. It all worked, it just looked a little bland.

There’s another way to control a printer, and it’s one you may have thought of before. Since the printer accepts commands via a serial port, you could take a computer like a Raspberry Pi with a nice LCD and just have it issue commands to the serial port. Bonus points if the board has more than one serial port so you can still hook up a PC or a Raspberry Pi running Octoprint or similar. Turns out, you don’t have to build this. The MKS touchscreen uses an ARM chip (it isn’t a Pi, though) and has a touch screen that you can use to control the printer. These come in different sizes and are usually called something like TFT35 for 3.5 inch display.

The advantage isn’t just appearance. Having a bunch of touch screen buttons makes many things easier. For example, if the printer is at (0,0) and you want to jog the head to (100,200), that ends up being a lot of button pushes in Marlin. With the touch display, you can bring up a navigation screen that makes it easy. Or, you can bring up an entire terminal and enter G-code. When you press Send, it shows the results of the command, if any. You can set a temperature with the knob, on-screen buttons, or press the number and type in what you want with a virtual keypad.

These displays are colorful and nice, but there are a few things they can’t do. Marlin has some wizards and user interaction that insist on a proper, local LCD. But the Marlin code thinks the MKS display is a remote host computer, connected over serial. Displays that can act like both types of LCDs are a sweet hack, and here’s the part that was never clear to me before: these displays can switch modes during printer operation. In other words, it is not a case of selecting a mode and rebooting everything. You can be looking at the colorful touchscreen, then switch over to the stock display while printing and then switch back any time you want. The best of both worlds.

On the face of it, the display looks like an MKS TFT. You have colorful menus and a touch screen. The connection for that is a simple two-wire serial port, along with — of course — power, ground, and an optional reset connection. They provide a cable you can use or modify to connect to your setup. There is also an EXT3 port for boards that have that connector.

However, if you wire the normal EXT1 and EXT2 ribbon cables to your printer, the display can emulate a normal 128×64 LCD. If you are already set up to use one of these displays, you should not need to recompile Marlin to use this display. However, if you are set up for a different type of display, you’ll need to tell Marlin to use the normal “REPRAP DISCOUNT GRAPHICS CONTROLLER.”

That’s huge. It means you can have a nice user interface that lets you control the printer, print from an SD card or USB stick, and even make customizations to the menu with the source code provided on GitHub or with a simple configuration file edit. (And, yes, you can add custom menu items simply.) But when you need to do something very specific to Marlin, or a new feature shows up that the LCD doesn’t know about yet, you can simply switch to the Marlin display mode. Then you can switch back.

The process to switch is simple. Just hold down the encoder knob or push the screen for a few seconds. A screen will show up allowing you to pick the Marlin mode or the BTT mode. Just touch the one you want. In Marlin mode, the touchscreen does nothing except switch modes, so you might want to use that method. If you hold the encoder down in Marlin mode, the printer will also see the repeated enter keys until the LCD pops up the selection screen.

If you use a bezel, be careful. If you tighten a case down enough to make the touch screen think you are pressing the screen, you’ll get stuck in the selection mode, which makes sense. Just don’t overtighten the LCD!

Installing the LCD was straightforward save a few problems. For some reason, the pin 1 designation for EXP1 and EXP2 are not consistent among vendors. A Geeetech display worked fine with the Spider board, but the TFT35 didn’t want to come up in Marlin mode at all. I applied power at the serial port and the board appeared hung. The answer was to snip off the alignment tabs on the ribbon cables and flip them 180 degrees.

The display has a number of other ports, but you probably shouldn’t use them. For example, there’s a port for a filament runout sensor. But if you connect it there, it will only work if you are printing using an SD card or USB stick in the display. A better option is to connect it to your printer and tell Marlin to notify the host if a filament break occurs. This will work with the display or something like Octoprint.

In theory, you should be able to connect Octoprint itself through one of the extra serial ports. However, I never got this to fully work. The subordinate port seems to work pretty well, but it never sends Octoprint acknowledgments so Octoprint waits forever or until you force it to continue — use the Fake Acknowledgment button in the terminal. Since the Spider has multiple serial ports, it isn’t a big deal, but in theory, the TFT should work a little better if it can intercept and filter the data stream between the printer and the host software. In practice, I don’t really notice any problems. Some Octoprint plugins like DisplayLayer can send status information to the TFT, anyway.

Another note: Using the jog keys sets the printer to relative mode. If you are used to popping codes into a terminal, you might want to get used to issuing a G90 before you send a move because the TFT will change it to relative anytime you do a jog.

The reason for LCD Display flashing screen: shielding coil; Signal interference; Hardware; Refresh frequency setting; Monitor time is too long; Too high...

In this article, you will learn how to use TFT LCDs by Arduino boards. From basic commands to professional designs and technics are all explained here.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

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. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

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. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

In electronics/computer hardware a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a microprocessor, microcontroller, ASIC or general-purpose peripheral interface and a particular type of display device, e.g. LCD, LED, OLED, ePaper, CRT, Vacuum fluorescent or Nixie.

The LCDs manufacturers use different drivers in their products. Some of them are more popular and some of them are very unknown. To run your display easily, you should use Arduino LCDs libraries and add them to your code. Otherwise running the display may be very difficult. There are many free libraries you can find on the internet but the important point about the libraries is their compatibility with the LCD’s driver. The driver of your LCD must be known by your library. In this article, we use the Adafruit GFX library and MCUFRIEND KBV library and example codes. You can download them from the following links.

By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println(); . First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().

Upload your image and download the converted file that the UTFT libraries can process. Now copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are size of the image.

while (a < b) { Serial.println(a); j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 255, 255)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

while (b < a) { j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 0, 0)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

Robin series motherboards adopt 32-bit ARM chips, support TFT touch screens of various sizes (2.4 / 2.8 / 3.2 / 3.5 / 4.3).Can achieve a variety of functions, such as breakpoint recovery, filament detection, Auto-off function, wifi transmission and other functions. The hardware has been open sourced, supporting makerbase’s independently developed firmware and marlin 2.0 open source firmware. Based on customer needs. Innovate our products.

Compared with FDM technology, LCD SLA technology is favored by the market due to an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy, but the market coverage rate is far inferior to FDM technology. Of course, there are various factors such as high cost, few solutions, and consumable limitations. To this end, MKS independently developed the MKS DLP motherboard and its supporting software to advance the development of LCD SLA 3D printing in terms of cost and solution.

Compared with FDM technology, LCD SLA technology is favored by the market due to an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy, but the market coverage rate is far inferior to FDM technology. Of course, there are various factors such as high cost, few solutions, and consumable limitations. To this end, MKS independently developed the MKS DLP motherboard and its supporting software to advance the development of LCD SLA 3D printing in terms of cost and solution.

I originally bought two of these to go with the two Voron 2.4 3d printer builds I was working on. The first one worked flawlessly, but the second one did not respond to touch. It was easy to troubleshoot because I could just simply swap the screens on the printers to confirm. So I returned the second one and bought another, which sortof works, but not anywhere near as well as the first one. About half of the time it seems fine, but the other half of the time it is either unresponsive to touch or the touch is way off in terms of accuracy, which is important on such a small screen. I am going to try to contact customer support and see if they will replace, otherwise Ill have to go through amazon again. Will update if customer service lives up to their job.

Next, we"ll need to configure the Raspberry Pi to launch a browser and load the OctoPrint/OctoPi interface on boot using the TouchUI boot to browser setup scripts.

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SHENZHEN, China, May 26, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ELEGOO, a leading company specializing in the research, development, and production of 3D printers, today launched the Saturn 2 8K MSLA Printer, the first 8K printer in its product portfolio, at a competitive price of US$500. It also unveiled a new series of 8K resins, its latest Mercury XS Bundle Washing and Curing machine, and the Neptune 3 FDM printer. The latest product lineup will be available for purchase from May 28, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC at ELEGOO Official Store.

ELEGOO"s Saturn 2 8K is equipped with a gorgeous 8K 10-inch mono LCD screen, which the company has jointly developed with Innolux, a subsidiary of the industry-leading Foxconn Technology Group, a professional TFT-LCD panel manufacturer and a supplier of the Apple company. Measuring 51.5% larger than the Mars series" 6.6-inch screen, the Saturn 2 8K"s screen delivers even more clarity and precision for 3D printing tasks. Plus, with a screen resolution reaching 7680*4320 pixels, Saturn 2 8K is more than capable of reproducing the exquisite details needed for realistic 3D models.

ELEGOO also released new iterations of highly popular products in its portfolio. A step up from the popular Neptune 2, the Neptune 3 printer is priced at $209.99, making it the most affordable option among 3D printers with features of RSG (Resistance Strain Gauge) Auto Leveling System, Filament Runout/Clog Detector and taking less than 10 minutes to install. In tandem, ELEGOO has launched its new Mars 3 Pro LCD Printer and Mercury XS Bundle Clean and Cure machine, priced at $300 and $180 respectively — making them highly cost-effective 3D printing products.

In this video, I am showing you how to connect Bigtreetech TFT35 touch displays to your SKR 1.3 or 1.4 mainboard, why it has two different modes to use it and what to configure in Marlin 2.0 for it.

Hello, my name is Daniel, welcome to the CrossLink channel. Our mission is to help 1 million people getting more successful with 3d printing and if you"re here for the first time, subscribe and enable bell notifications so you don"t miss anything.

So, you might have noticed, there is multiple different shapes and sizes of this Bigtreetech TFT35 display available. This one is the TFT35 E3 3.0, which has the knob underneath the display and this fits also in the Ender 3 stock display mount, there is also the regular TFT35 with the knob on the side but they technically absolutely work the same.

The first one is the touch screen mode, where you have a nice color touch display to control your printer, start printing for example, set the temperature and see the status of your printer.

The second mode is the "Marlin" or 12864 simulation mode, which will show the original printer menu from the Marlin firmware running on the SKR mainboard.

The TFT35 and all other models of this display on the other hand have a full 32bit microcontroller with it"s own memory on board that has it"s own firmware and can be upgraded and programmed independently from the printer mainboard.

The information that is sent back and forth over that serial connection is not pixels. It"s just GCODE commands and GCODE reponses. That makes this display more or less act like a raspberry Pi that runs Octoprint on it or a computer that runs Pronterface for example. And what is shown on the display to you is not controlled by the printer mainboard firmware if you"re in touch mode.

But being independent from the printer also means that the TFT touch display is agnostic to what kind of printer you exactly have. So for example it doesn"t know and it also doesn"t care what kind of stepper motor drivers it has or what kind of firmware it"s running.

And because of having these specific features, this printer has certain user interface entries in the 12864 menu like the tmc driver configuration, which are not represented in the touch menu.

The serial cable that comes with your display will have a plug that fits into the RS232 or TFT slot at the back of the display. So let"s plug that in here.

What happens if you misorient that cable? Well, nothing serious. If you turn on your printer and the screen keeps black, power off, insert the connector 180 degrees swapped and try again.

It might be that the display orientation is swapped, that also depends on how you like to mount the display to your printer. So if you need to change the display orientation, you can do this from the touch display by tapping Settings → Screen → and then rotate UI. Then you will need to run through a screen calibration tapping the red dots that appear in the corners and then finally the center.

The next issue you might have could be that the display shows "no printer attached" so that it cannot communicate to the printer. That"s actually normal when you freshly turn the printer on and it should then disappear after a few seconds. If this error persists any longer, your baudrate setting for the serial connection is most probably different from what you have set in Marlin firmware.

Then I am looking for the REPRAP DISCOUNT FULL GRAPHIC SMART CONTROLLER, this is the right setting to enable for the 12864 simulation with the TFT35 and I am uncommenting this line. Don"t confuse this with the REPRAP DISCOUNT SMART CONTROLLER, that"s not the right setting to enable.

Next up in this series, I am going to show you how to flash the latest bigtreetech firmware to the TFT35 display and also how to customize the UI to show more useful information on the start page, and to be more colorful with custom icons and logos.