160x128 tft display gif arduino made in china

U8g2 proivided various font type and stored in compressed format. So U8g2 font gives more UI design possibilities and still can fit in the MCU limited storage space. Using U8g2 font in Arduino_GFX simply include U8g2lib.h before Arduino_GFX_Library.h:

No read operation. Since not all display provide read back graphic memories API, Arduino_GFX skip all read operations. It can reduce the library size footprint and sometimes reduce the operation time.

Tailor-made data bus classes. Arduino_GFX decouple data bus operation from display driver, it is more easy to write individual data bus class for each platform.

Most tiny displays in hobbyist electronics world support 8-bit SPI, but some require 9-bit SPI. Arduino_GFX should be the first Arduino display library that can use ESP32 SPI to support 9-bit hardware SPI. It is important to support the displays that require 9-bit SPI interface. (e.g. HX8357B, ...)

Larger displays most likely do not support standalone SPI since it is not fast enough to refresh the full screen details. Most of them support 8-bit/16-bit Parallel interface.

Some larger display require RGB + 3-bit SPI combo interface, This interface requies at most 3(9-bit SPI) + 4(CS, CD, WR, RD) + 24(RBG888) = 31 pins. Most dev board do not have enough GPIO to support this. Arduino_GFX is stick to RGB565 color, so RGB666 and RGB888 require some connection hack. E.g. RGB666 connect R5 and R6 together, B5 and B6 together to become RGB565. Then the least GPIO requirement can become 3(9-bit SPI) + 2(CD, WR) + 16(RBG565) = 21 pins. Remember always pull down CS pin and always pull up RD pin.

This project is a microcontroller board, based on an ATtiny414, that can accommodate a range of different Adafruit and AliExpress colour TFT displays:

It"s ideal for use with my Tiny TFT Graphics Library 2, and includes an I2C interface and optional crystal, making it suitable for use in sensor and clock projects.

While working on my Tiny TFT Graphics Library I needed to test it with several different TFT displays on a prototyping board, and noticed that many of them, with a small number of exceptions, had one of two standard pin connection layouts. That gave me the idea of designing a breakout board that would take any of these displays, and be a great starting point for a variety of display-based projects.

The board accommodates any of a variety of Adafruit or AliExpress colour TFT displays – for details see the tables below. The display connection header pin holes are staggered so you can push the display in place, and it will stay firmly connected without soldering. This is especially useful if you want to try different displays in an application.

Although you could drive these TFT displays from an 8-pin ATtiny processor such as the ATtiny402, I decided to base the board on a 14-pin device, such as the ATtiny414, to allow it to offer the following additional optional features:

Use the 11-way row of pins for Adafruit displays. Note that a couple of Adafruit TFT displays have an incompatible pinout; if you"re not sure whether your display is compatible check that it has the following 11-way pin header:

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. They also include an SD-card socket, and a separate SDCS select line for the SD card.

Some of the AliExpress displays include a LDO 3.3V regulator, but none of them include logic-level translation, so I recommend only interfacing them to a processor running from 3.3V.

The header pin holes are staggered, with each hole shifted 8 mil (~0.2 mm) off-centre. This allows you to push the display"s pin headers in place, and they will stay firmly connected without soldering. To remove them press evenly with a suitable flat object. Of course you also have the option of soldering them if you prefer, for a permanent solution.

The processor can be any of the 0-series, 1-series, or 2-series ATtiny range in a 14-pin SOIC package, from the ATtiny404 to the ATtiny3224, but note that the timer crystal is only supported by a 1-series or 2-series device. They are all software compatible, so the same program will work on any of them. My Tiny TFT Graphics Library 2 needs more than 2Kbytes so I don"t recommend using the ATtiny204 or ATtiny214, which only have 2Kbytes of program memory.

If you want to control the backlight, or use the SD-card socket on the Adafruit displays, fit 0Ω resistors in the appropriate positions to act as links. Alternatively PA5 and PA6 are available on header pins D1 and D2 for other uses.

The Universal TFT Display Backpack is ideal for use with my Tiny TFT Graphics Library 2, which is optimised for use with ATtiny microcontrollers such as the ATtiny414. You could also use my Compact TFT Graphics Library which uses standard Arduino SPI routines, but I"m not sure why you would want to as it"s not as fast as the Tiny TFT library.

If you"ve fitted the leftmost 0Ω link resistor, you can use PA5 (Arduino pin 1) to control the display backlight. For example, to turn the backlight off:

Then upload the program to the Universal TFT Display Backpack using a UPDI programmer. The recommended option is to use a USB to Serial board, such as the SparkFun FTDI Basic board

EastRising UART display is an LCD screen that uses UART serial port for communication. The user sends instructions to the serial LCD screen through the single-chip microcomputer, and the serial port screen will automatically complete all operations of drawing on the LCD. Due to the simple operation, even people who do not know any programming can easily develop the human-computer interaction interface they want.

2. The operating software is generally divided into two parts, namely system software running on the UART display and interface development software UI Editor running on PC Windows operating system" ,UI EMULATOR for program debugging software.

The user first uses the UI Editor to make the "Project BIN file", and then downloads the compiled "Project BIN file" to the FLASH of the serial port display through the UART port or USB port or SD card of the UART display.

EastRising UART displays are widely used in industrial automation, electric power, telecommunications, environmental protection, medical care, finance, petroleum, chemical industry, transportation, energy, geology, metallurgy, public inquiry and monitoring, smart home appliances, transportation rails, data centers, charging piles, electric power Dozens of industries and fields such as medical care, national defense security, and shared equipment.

After starting the software, you can use the UART serial port to update the MCU (MCU_Code.bin) or update the SPI Flash data (UartTFT_Flash.bin).Totorial

Based on Arduino_GFX and gifdec, espgfxGIF is an Arduino sketch that plays animated GIF on TFT screen of some Arduino Dev modules, mainly esp32 and esp8266.

TFT_eSPI, which is the most common TFT graphic library, supports BMP, and MJPEG/JPEG files via drawBmp() and drawJpeg(). However, due to the way how GIF handles cmap with custom color palettes, drawGIF is not supported (as what I am aware of). Adafruit_GFX also lack support for animated GIF. Color corruption is a common issue.

Arduino_GFX is a rewritten library from Adafruit_GFX, TFT_eSPI to support various displays with various data bus interfaces. Using gifdec to fill the GIF frames into to display data bus, an animated GIF can be played on the TFT display.

9. Put your own animated GIF files on the "espgfxGIF/data" folder. Please note most esp32 DEV modules only have 1Mb of SPIFFS. Limit your total file size to 900Kb.

If you are not using m5Stack m5StickC or TTGO T-Display, please add your own configuration to the script after line 52. You need to declare your canvas and data-bus class, MOSI, SCLK, CS, DC, RST, BL pins, as well as control button pins

Arduino_DataBus *bus = new Arduino_RPiPicoSPI(27 /* DC */, 17 /* CS */, PIN_SPI0_SCK /* SCK */, PIN_SPI0_MOSI /* MOSI */, PIN_SPI0_MISO /* MISO */, spi0 /* spi */);

Hi - does anyone know if it would be possible to hook up 8 of these 1.44/1.8"" inch 128x128 128x160 TFT Full Color SPI LCD Display Modules to a Teensy 3.6 (via SPI) - for displaying 8 different pieces of text at the same time.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-44-1-8-inch-128x128-128x160-TFT-Full-Color-SPI-LCD-Display-Module-Arduino/273799310724?_trkparms=aid%3D555018%26algo%3DPL.SI M%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D58657%26meid%3D4145da608a974df4 82a8df339983fd29%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D1 2%26sd%3D273768143750%26itm%3D273799310724&_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851

You might run into issues, like can you have multiple instances of the display object where all of the state information is contained within the object or does the library store a lot of this as global variables...

How many updates how quickly need to be made across the displays? Simple text update on each screen one at a time - or dynamic response across multiple displays?

Given the lower pixel count - if the update rate isn"t excessive it seems there should be a way to use the SPI bus and a way to switch the CS pin across the like displays.

The 7-pin display modules do not need "just" SPI, but also CS (Chip Select), D/C (Data or Command), Reset, and optionally a PWM pin for controlling the backlight. As KurtE mentioned, this should work in theory, but the problem is existing library support. The CS pins need to be separate, but all can share the D/C and Reset pins (although you cannot then reset just one display; you can only reset them all if you need to). There is always the risk that the display modules don"t like sharing their lines among so many modules -- for example, if there are too many pull-up/down resistors in the lines, or even if the modules don"t like their D/C pins toggled when their CS is not selected.

The existing ST7735 libraries I looked at do not use a canvas, but send the pixel data resulting from drawing commands via SPI. Assuming 16-bit RGB color, each 128�128 frame needs 32768 bytes; 128�160 needs 40960 bytes. With a full canvas, it would be much easier to support the eight SPI displays, because then the SPI transfers could use DMA. If the library is the only one using that SPI bus, you could avoid the CS pin restrictions by reserving the hardware CS pin (i.e., keep it unused), and let the SPI library think it is using hardware CS pins, too.

The leftover issues is that I don"t know of any graphics libraries for the 16-bit color canvas; you"d need to write your own. The easiest would be to just read them from raw binary files from a microSD card using Paul"s SD library. (It is trivial to convert to/from that raw hardware format and e.g. NetPBM binary .ppm format; and NetPBM tools contain converters to/from JPEG, GIF, and PNG.) Still, you"d need some kind of font-drawing (overlaying on top of image read from microSD) at least. So, quite a bit of coding work.

There is at least one seller on eBay (https://www.ebay.com/sch/LCD-Display-Modules/181887/m.html?&_armrs=1&_ssn=dig-ole) with RGB TFT display modules (of various sizes) that support I2c. These have some sort of microcontroller on board, and you can set different I2C addresses for each module, so you should be able to control several of these on the same I2C bus (without the I2C multiplexer). Instead of pixel data, you send the drawing or writing commands as text to the desired module, so no library per se is needed. They also cost about three or four times as much as the above 7-pin display modules.

There are up to 1.3" single-color OLED displays using the SSD1306 controller. I have the white ones, and I like them quite a bit. Make sure you look at the four-pin ones. In the yellow/blue models, the pixels near the top are yellow, and the rest are blue, on a black background. So, each pixel is always the same color if lit: monochrome. The larger ones (0.96" and 1.3") are 128�64, the smaller (0.91") are 128�32.

Use eight identical I2C displays, and an I2C multiplexer like Adafruit sells (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-tca9548a-1-to-8-i2c-multiplexer-breakout/overview) (or a cheap eBay clone). You only need minimal changes to the Adafruit SSD1306 library (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_SSD1306), to fully support the I2C multiplexer. This is because the library only communicates with the display at init and display times. At init time, all displays need to be initialized (a new constructor function, that takes the heights of the up to eight displays into account, and drops the splash). A new variant of the .display() method takes an additional parameter, to choose the display to be updated with the current canvas; you can even update the same canvas to multiple displays. You can also add helpers so that the canvas is easy to load from a 1024- or 512-byte (128�64 or 128�32 bit) raw binary file on a microSD card (say, using Paul"s SD library), in case you want to display nice pre-drawn icons, and optionally add text/lines/bars on top. Drawing/writing text to the canvas is done using Adafruit GFX library (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library). There is only one canvas, but you can send it to any display or displays. (You can obviously also keep the icons in Flash, but there isn"t that much room there.)

These displays can be used with either serial UARTs, i2c, or SPI. And you can probably run some on serial UART (the Teensy 3.6 has 6 separate UARTs), SPI, or i2c. I only used it with serial UARTs when I used it a few years ago. IIRC, the library they had needed a simple edit to treat the Teensy like a standard Arduino.

If you go with i2c, there is a command to change the i2c address in the library. So you would need to hook up a new display, and change it to a unique address, and then from then on, use the new address. That is probably the simplest approach. I don"t know if a single i2c bus can hold 8 displays (it probably can, as long as the wires are short).

It looks like the OLED monitors use about 110mA (at 5v) and the first LCD monitor I checked used 0.5mA to 135mA (at 5v). For 8 displays, you would need on the order of 1 amp of power. You will need an independent 3.3v (or 5v) power source as this goes above what a Teensy can supply either through its VIN or 3.3v terminals. (remember to cross connect the grounds) to drive 8 displays.

Unlike the the displays you mentioned, the dig-ole displays have their own memory. This means you don"t have to keep a copy of the display in the Teensy 3.6 and send it to the display. Instead the library sends commands to the display (draw line, write text, etc.). The Teensy only has 256k. I don"t think if it has enough memory to support 8 full displays in color if you had to have the screen image in the Teensy.

When I ordered my displays, I ordered them from the Canadian office and not the Chinese office. I think it was a little more than a week, but it has been some time since I ordered them.

A completely different approach would be to use one large monitor, and put a physical mask over the display to make it look like 8 separate displays. I just got mail that the 7" Gamedunio 3X is now shipping:

1a) So assuming you found a USB power source that can deliver 1 amp, you can"t just connect your screens to the Teensy"s 3.3v or VIN pins, as the Teensy has limiters to prevent providing that much power. Instead, you have to connect the displays to the USB power before it gets to the Teensy, so that they can be powered directly.

1c) You could build a USB to USB cable that allows you to get the power before it enters the Teensy for the displays. This way you don"t have to cut the solder jumper.

2) If your USB power solution doesn"t have enough power, you may need to use two or more power inputs. You often see this with the long ws2812b (neopixel) or apa102 (dotstar) light strings, where a single power source is not enough to power all of the LEDs. Instead you use multiple power sources, say connecting one USB battery to power 4 displays, another USB battery to power the other 4 displays, and the 3rd battery to power the Teensy. Between each of the batteries, you make sure the ground wire (typically black) is connected to each of the power supplies., but the power wire (5v) is not connected between the supplies.

I would say start out small. Get two displays. You should be able to power them with the Teensy and start working on getting them to work. Then after they are working, you can tackle the issues with power.

I would say start out small. Get two displays. You should be able to power them with the Teensy and start working on getting them to work. Then after they are working, you can tackle the issues with power.

I"m planning on driving six 1.44" ST7735 displays using a Teensy 3.2 and the ST7735_t3 library. MOSI, SCK, DC, and RST will be common across all six displays. I"m using pin 15 for DC, so CS can be any of 10, 2, 9, 6, 20, 23, 21, or 22 and still be using hardware SPI. I"m not specifying RST in the ST7735 constructor, so it won"t be triggered by the ST7735 initialization routine in the library. I"m pulsing the RST line in my code before calling the ST7735 library"s initialization routine.

For 3.2/3.5/3.6, you can only have 4 displays for the fast DMA control (you can have 5 fast ports, but you need both a DC and CS pin for the displays, you can share the DC pin but not the CS pin). In addition, while there are 9 pins, several of the pins overlap, and you can use either one or the other pin, but not both in the same time. The pins are:

DigoleSerialDisp mydisp(&Wire, "\x27"); //I2C:Arduino UNO: SDA (data line) is on analog input pin 4, and SCL (clock line) is on analog input pin 5 on UNO and Duemilanove

For 3.2/3.5/3.6, you can only have 4 displays for the fast DMA control (you can have 5 fast ports, but you need both a DC and CS pin for the displays, you can share the DC pin but not the CS pin). In addition, while there are 9 pins, several of the pins overlap, and you can use either one or the other pin, but not both in the same time. The pins are:

What if I add a SN74LCV244N between the four available chip-selects, tying the chip-selects to both halves of the input to the octal buffer? I then use two non-CS pins to control the tri-state outputs to up to eight displays. I"ll have to add 10k or so pull-ups on the tri-state outputs. It might be necessary to add a second SN74LC244N between MOSI, SCK, DC, and RESET, just to act as a driver. I don"t know if the Teensy has enough drive for six (or more) displays on the common pins.

What if I add a SN74LCV244N between the four available chip-selects, tying the chip-selects to both halves of the input to the octal buffer? I then use two non-CS pins to control the tri-state outputs to up to eight displays. I"ll have to add 10k or so pull-ups on the tri-state outputs. It might be necessary to add a second SN74LC244N between MOSI, SCK, DC, and RESET, just to act as a driver. I don"t know if the Teensy has enough drive for six (or more) displays on the common pins.

The pins I was mentioning are used in a much higher speed transfer method that uses background DMA to speed up transfers to the display. If you use this faster method, both the CS and DC pins have to come out of the set of pins mentioned. This technique was first done by Paul for speeding up the ILI9341 320x240 display (which PJRC.COM sells). Several of the other display drivers have adapted this technique. In theory, it should fall back to the normal slower SPI data transfer mechanisms if you don"t use the right pins.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, once you get more than two of these OLED displays, you will need to work on powering the displays. The OLED 128x128 displays draw something like 110 - 125mA. Drawing power from the Teensy"s VIN pin will only give you about 250mA before the fuse within the Teensy between the USB port and VIN sets in. If you wire it so the displays get their power from the USB line before plugging it into the Teensy, you can get more power. But the USB 2.0 spec limits you to typically 500mA (4 displays). Above 4 displays, you will need to think about how to get about an amp of power (at 5v) to power the displays.

OLED displays tend to need a lot of power, depending on whether the screen is mostly dark (low power) or mostly bright (high power). The TFT displays tend to need a lot less power, and the power usage is more consistent as the main power draw is the backlight. OLED displays are much brighter, and you see the display from a wider angle than a TFT display. But as I"ve discovered the TFT displays can be run at a faster speed, while I found with the 128x128 OLED displays, I had to slow down communication with the display when running a Teensy 3.5/3.6 at full speed.

So far, I have not had to limit the TFT speed, as my two displays kept up, even when I was using a Teensy 3.6 over-clocked to the fastest speed. While for the OLED display, I had to limit the SPI bus to 11Mhz so that the display was not corrupted. I"ve tried different manufacturers (Adafruit, Wavelan, New Haven) of the OLED display, and some (Wavelan, New Haven) could be cranked a bit higher than the Adafruit display.

In another post (the Teensy 4.0 beta thread), I posted about the Adafruit program uncanny eyes, which has two 128x128 displays that draw eyeballs and have the eyes move around. I have two main test beds, a Teensy 3.2 driving 2 TFT 128x128 displays, and a Teensy 3.5 driving 2 OLED displays. Both of these test beds use the 9 special pins and do use the DMA methods to speed up the display. The numbers I got were:

Yes. Good catch. The original Arduino Uno had its I2C pins on A4/A5, and the Teensy adapted the same convention. Later Arduino boards put the I2C pins on other pins.

One thing to note: is the system will not tell your it is an error if for example you setup one display to use pin 10 and another pin 2... There is nothing currently on system that keeps track of which hardware CS signals have been grabbed... It will complain if you try to use 10 and 2 on the same display.

But again that code does not detect and fallback that if for example one display uses pin 10 and then second one tries to use pin 2, they will both try to use the hardware way...

One thing to note: is the system will not tell your it is an error if for example you setup one display to use pin 10 and another pin 2... There is nothing currently on system that keeps track of which hardware CS signals have been grabbed... It will complain if you try to use 10 and 2 on the same display.

I was able to get six displays running off of a Teensy 3.2. I had to use the updated library from https://github.com/PaulStoffregen/ST7735_t3 dated July 7, 2019.

where back and fore are the R3G3B2 colors (0 to 255, inclusive), x and y are the coordinates, and text is the text to display. The setMode("C") is the crucial bit.

http://www.gammon.com.au/i2c (note, this article mostly talks about 5v systems like the Arduino UNO, details will be somewhat different on 3.3v systems)

Naively, I might expect an i2c bus multiplexer to help, as at any one time, you only have 3 devices on the i2c bus (Teensy, bus multipler, and the display it connects to) rather than having 8 displays + Teensy (but note, this is only a guess). I can imagine the total length of the wires for 8 displays might be beyond i2c limits:

In essence, each of teh 8 displays has its 2 x i2c wires (each ~300mm in length) connected to a rail/bus on a board (so 8 to 1 for SDA & again 8 to 1 for SCL).

ie Teensy SDA pin to SDA pin of Display 1, then SDA pin of Display 1 to SDA pin of Display 2, then SDA pin of Display 3 to SDA pin of Display 3, etc.

I appreciate from previous comments, that I may be pushing the limits of this type of bus with my setup - but can anyone suggest any things I can do to speed up the writting to the displays pls.

As the displays are located next to each other in a single row of 8, the data writing appears like a ripple/domino effect from LHS display to RHS display.

Ultimately, I suspect the only way to speed things up is to rewrite them so you have one processor per display that reads a simple message from the master teensy, and each processor then does the writing to the display. You are still single threading the write of the messages, but there you would optimize the protocol between the master teensy and the slave processor to send as little data as possible (i.e. just the text, and the slave would do all of the color, etc.). It really depends on how much effort you are wanting to put into this, as this can be a rabbit hole. These slave processors don"t necessarily have to be Teensys, though if they aren"t Teensys, you have to now program two different environments, and you have to possibly update 9 processors (though I would imagine that after you do the normal development, the display processors wouldn"t need to be updated). Of course now you would need to power all 9 processors in addition to the 8 displays.

If you hunt around, you can find 3.3v Arduino Uno clones fairly cheaply. These typically aren"t programmed via USB, so you would need a programmer cable. For example:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/5pcs-Arduino-Pro-Mini-Compatible-Board-8MHz-3-3V-Headers-Bootloader-ATMEGA328P/202723449015?_trkparms=aid%3D555018%26algo%3DPL.SI M%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D57475%26meid%3D2ed0547e758845da 8e4e005061f5ed4d%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D1 2%26sd%3D362705636961%26itm%3D202723449015%26pg%3D 2047675&_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851

If the text is mostly unchanging, you could restructure things so that you only update any display whose information actually changed, and only update the parts of the screen that change.

I could imagine high end displays would have double buffer support, where it displays from one buffer, but the communication builds up the next display in another buffer, and then when everything is in place, you send the command to switch buffers. Looking at the digole programming manual, the only item that jumped out at me is if you had the mono displays, you could send FS0 to stop the refresh from the internal buffer, and FS1 to restart it. So you could go through 8 displays turn off refresh, then go through all 8 displays update the text, and then go through all 8 displays and re-enable the refresh.

If the text is mostly unchanging, you could restructure things so that you only update any display whose information actually changed, and only update the parts of the screen that change.

Can"t confess to understand how the DigoleSerialDisp library was interacting/interfacing with the Wire library - but to get that working I had to ceclare this for each display/address:

I was able to get six 1.44" displays running on a Teensy 3.2. I used SCK on 14, MOSI on 11, DC on 21. I used CS on 10, 9, 15, 20 (normal CS pins) plus pins 3 and 4.

With the SPI clock at 24 MHz the displays using pins 3 and 4 showed upside-down images. I tried slowing down the SPI clock and the displays on pins 3 and 4 showed the image right-side up but narrow. I tried 20 MHz (upside down) 16 MHz (narrow), 8 MHz (narrow), and 4 MHz (narrow). Changing the compiler optimization level from "Faster" to "Fast" fixed the problem -- I now have the SPI clock at 20 MHz and all six displays are working correctly.

Place the block before send display data. You can choose the position, color and size. For the screen, (1,1) is on top-left, and (160,128) is on bottom-right

While I was looking for a TFT display for a project with Arduino, I found on several webstores some displays based on the ST7735 chip by Sitronix (datasheet).

Based on its datasheet, the ST7735 chip has a SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) interface, but the pin names on the silk screen of my display “seem” to suggest an I2C interface (SDA, SCL…):

First identify – based on your Arduino board – which pins correspond to the different signals of the SPI bus. For the others, you can freely choose between the remaining pins.

(as you see, I connected the BLK pin directly to Vcc to have the backlight always on. You can also connect it to an Arduino digital pin to be able to control the backlight via software, for example if you need to save power).

Adafruit wrote a fantastic tutorial to explain how to use them, here I only want to show you how to setup the display for the connections I made earler:

If you’re using a board based on the esp32 chip and you need to display bitmap images, give a look to my library, SPIFFS_ImageReader, which perfectly integrates with the ones by Adafruit!

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.