arduino 2.4 tft lcd touch shield sketch factory

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use and set up 2.4″ Touch LCD Shield for Arduino. First, you’ll see some general information about this shield. And after learning how to set the shield up, you’ll see 3 practical projects.

The role of screens in electronic projects is very important. Screens can be of very simple types such as 7 Segment or character LCDs or more advanced models like OLEDs and TFT LCDs.

One of the most important features of this LCD is including a touch panel. If you are about to use the LCD, you need to know the coordinates of the point you touch. To do so, you should upload the following code on your Arduino board and open the serial monitor. Then touch your desired location and write the coordinates displayed on the serial monitor. You can use this coordination in any other project.

To display pictures on this LCD you should save the picture in 24bit BMP colored format and size of 240*320. Then move them to SD card and put the SD card in the LCD shield. we use the following function to display pictures. This function has 3 arguments; the first one stands for the pictures name, and the second and third arguments are for length and width coordinates of the top left corner of the picture.

If you want to display pictures without using an SD card, you can convert it to code and then display it. You can display even several photos sequentially without delay to create an animation. (Check this) But be aware that in this case, Arduino UNO may not be suitable (because of low processor speed). We recommend using the Arduino Mega or Arduino DUE.

The 2.4 ” tft lcd touch screen shield for Arduino can be used in a number of applications. However many of the shields available on the market are cloned versions which usually give many hobbyists hard time to use because they do not work properly with the common libraries for running TFT displays.

If you try uploading any of the examples in the Adafruit_GFX library for example the “graphicstest”, the lcd will just give a white screen. Nothing is displayed on the screen!

This problem is mainly due to using a newer version of the Adafruit GFX library. The 1.5.4 release of the Adafruit_GFX library broke compatibility with the Adafruit_TFTLCD library. So you have to roll back to Adafruit_GFX 1.5.3:

Another problem you may encounter with this tft lcd shield is the poor fuctioning of the touch screen. You may find the stylus pen is not well aligned with the content you are writing on the screen.

This is due to a bug in the TouchScreen library therefore you need to locate this library by following the path to where all the libraries for your Arduino IDE are stored.

First change it to return TSPoint(1023-x, 1023-y, z). Save the changes and then compile your code again and upload to check if the touch fuction is fine.

You can keep on adjusting the values of before x and y until you get an ideal point that works best for your tft lcd. Mine worked fine with return TSPoint(x, 1105-y, z)

Due to the limited processing power of the microprocessor in the Arduino, we need to store images in bmp format and they should be 320×240 pixels sizes.

Ever wanted to know how to make a simple drawing program on a LCD display, or are you curious about programming touch screens? Well, in this tutorial, we will be covering on how do you program a touchscreen display using the 2.4″ Touchscreen LCD sheild with Arduino Uno, which open up many possible applications which includes making a user friendly touch interface for making purchases, a simple touch-screen base remote control, and many more.

Hooking up the 2.4″ TFT LCD Touchscreen shield is realatively easy, since it is a Arduino shield. Just plug in the whole screen into the Arduino Uno, just note where the pins are located and connect the shield accordingly. There will be 2 parts in this tutoria, the first where you will test the functionality of the screen, and the next where you test the touch functionality of the screen.

For the graphics test of the 2.4″ screen, I used the sample sketch provided by the Adafruit TFTLCD library. The library can be downloaded here or here. (NOTE: You have to have the Adafruit GFX library installed before this library is installed, as the TFTLCD library uses the Adafruit GFX library for graphics. The library can be downloaded at https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library) A great thanks to Adafruit for their libraries.

Try uploading the example ‘graphictest’ sketch of the TFTLCD library. The screen should then be running the graphics test as shown above. If the screen displays nothing or displays only static, you may want to follow the steps taken below.

The modification I made in the example sketch is that I hard coded the LCD Driver, as for my case, the Arduino was unable to detect the LCD driver (and only produced noise on the screen).

Therefore, I set identifier variable as 0x9341 (located at line 60), which means that the shield is actually using a IL9341 LCD driver. Below are some useful links that may help if you encounter any difficulties:

This is the hardcoded sketch. Please upload the ‘graphictest’ example sketch of the TFTLCD library. If there is static or no display, you may need to modify the ‘identifier’ variable depending on which LCD driver you are using. Below is a sample code of the LCD Driver hard coded.// IMPORTANT: Adafruit_TFTLCD LIBRARY MUST BE SPECIFICALLY

Open & upload the ‘tftpaint’ example sketch from the TFTLCD library. (You may want to calibrate the screen first before using it. To do so, visit this post where I written a calibration code which can be used in this example. However, please note that certain parameters have to be changed for the calibration sketch to work with this 2.4″ screen.)

If the sketch does not run properly, you may want to do the following modifications. For my case, I need to modify a few parts, which includes:Hardcoding the LCD Driver

The AZ-Delivery 2.4” TFT LCD Touch Display boasts 320x 240 pixels with 16-bit color. It has Touch capabilities, a built-in SD card drive, and plugs straight onto the top of an Arduino UNO or Mega. Amazon charges less than £11 for this device. It offers a major step up from the tiny SSD1306 128×64 monochrome display.

The TFT screen is much larger than the SSD1306 128×64 and much more colourful. The package includes an SD card reader on the underside and a stylus for accurate touch-screen control.

AZ-Delivery usually supply an e-book (pdf document for download) with their boards. The German version comes first followed by other languages. This has just become available and provides setup instructions and a demonstration graphics only sketch.

The underside of the board has labels on the pins. As the board is an Arduino shield, it will only fit on a UNO in one position. The SD card reader sits between USB and the power socket. It will also plug into and Arduino MEGA 2560. J1 and J2 fit into the digital pins, covering D0 to D13, while J3 and J4 fit into the analog and power pins.

I searched the Web for drivers and examples and found a great deal of praise for the TFT graphics, reports of problems with the Touch control and nothing about the SD card reader on this board.

In the end I installed several libraries (with all dependencies): Adafruit GFX, Adafruit TFTLCD, Adafruit TouchScreen, Adafruit ILI9341, MCUFRIEND_kbv and SPFD5408-master. (The last 2 are not essential but include some interesting examples). The SD library is included in the basic Arduino set.

I’ve used GFX with mono displays such as SSD1306 and soon got the TFT display working. The following script gives some idea about what it can do. I’ve included pixels, text (of varying sizes), lines, rectangles, triangles, squares, graphs, screen rotation, and text on a path. I was very impressed with the clarity, speed, brightness, and colors produced.

Normally, when setting the colour of an RGB LED you have a range of 0-255 (0-FF hex) for each RGB component which gives white = FFFFFF, red = FF000, green FF00 and blue = FF. This is 24-bit colour and takes 3 bytes.  224 gives 16,777,216 different colours. The TFT screen is a 16-bit colour device which can display 65,536 different colours – more than enough. Here the range is limited to 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 bits for green. (Our eyes are more sensitive to green so It gets the extra bit of accuracy.)

The following sketch gives an indication of the colours available by converting an array of 24-bit colour values into their 16-bit equivalent and displaying them on the screen with the data. There are not enough pixels on the screen to display all the colours at once so the last part of the sketch takes out the least significant green bit and displays half the available colours six ways.

To check that everything is in order you can run the “CardInfo” sketch from the Examples tab of the File muenu. (File =>> Examples =>> SD =>> CardInfo.)  Make sure you set:

An obvious use for the SD reader is to log readings from sensors and display the results on the TFT display. Unfortunately,  the shield covers and uses most of the pins. The solution is to connect just the SD reader and power pins with jump leads which leaves plenty of pins to collect data from sensors.

Most Arduino users seldom use string manipulation. The documentation and a few simple examples of how to use strings are well scattered over the Web and difficult to find. The first sketch demonstrates how to create a file of 5 records/lines, each made up from an integer, a string, and a floating-point variable. The file is called datalog6.txt.

The second sketch reads the data we have saved in the datalog6.txt file. It splits each line/record into the 3 strings and then converts one to an Integer and the another to Floating Point. Just to prove that they are now stored as numbers it multiplies them together and displays the result.

This is the part that often causes the most trouble with many owners giving up at this point. It may be because there are several different configurations of the pins used to connect to the touch layers of the screen on the many varied breakout boards and shields using this display. In this case four of the pins are used, at different times, to control both the graphics or the touch elements of the screen.

This is a resistive touch screen, rather than a capacitive one. Above the graphics, layers are two transparent resistive layers held apart by tiny dimples. One is connected at the top and bottom and the other at the sides. A potential difference is applied across them and when the stylus or a finger presses on the screen an electrical connection is made between the resistive layers.

Try running the sketch to draw on the screen. The BLACK palette ‘button’ clears the screen and the others change the ‘ink’ colour. If the dot drawn is not directly under the stylus you can adjust the ‘fudge factors’ in the scaling section.

As a final example here is a sketch which shows off the Touch screen with buttons, bar graphs and colours. The buttons allow the user to adjust the RGB mix to display all the possible colours available. If you find one you particularly like it displays the hex value of the 16-bit colour.

There is a small amount of jitter as the bar graph re-draws but overall, the shield works quickly and very well. After the screen has updated and waiting for a touch the image is steady, sharp, and bright. Once you have calibrated the touch device it is very accurate as demonstrated with the small (30×30 pixel buttons) and provides excellent, colorful graphics on a usefully large display.

The SD card reader is a bonus, and could always be used, via jump wires, to record values from sensors on the other pins. These values could then be displayed graphically on the display with a different sketch.

I was very pleased with the quality of the display and the accuracy of the Touch device. It sits neatly and securely on a UNO or a MEGA 2560. With an SD card reader included it was excellent value and I will be making good use of it in the future.

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is 2.4" diagonal and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240x320 pixels with individual pixel control. As a bonus, this display has a optional capacitive touch panel and resistive touch panel with controller XPT2046 attached by default.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you"ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (UNO/Due/Mega 2560).

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. You can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs.

Of course, we wouldn"t just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we"ve written a full open source graphics library at the bottom of this page that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. We also have a touch screen library that detects x,y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

If you"ve had a lot of Arduino DUEs go through your hands (or if you are just unlucky), chances are you’ve come across at least one that does not start-up properly.The symptom is simple: you power up the Arduino but it doesn’t appear to “boot”. Your code simply doesn"t start running.You might have noticed that resetting the board (by pressing the reset button) causes the board to start-up normally.The fix is simple,here is the solution.

I"ll show you how to get started with a very popular variant of the TFT touch screen, including how to make a "button" (spoiler alert: it"s not a button just an area of screen that looks like one, that you can then receive touches from).

In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

For this tutorial I composed three examples. The first example is distance measurement using ultrasonic sensor. The output from the sensor, or the distance is printed on the screen and using the touch screen we can select the units, either centimeters or inches.

The third example is a game. Actually it’s a replica of the popular Flappy Bird game for smartphones. We can play the game using the push button or even using the touch screen itself.

As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.

Here’s the circuit schematic. We will use the GND pin, the digital pins from 8 to 13, as well as the pin number 14. As the 5V pins are already used by the TFT Screen I will use the pin number 13 as VCC, by setting it right away high in the setup section of code.

I will use the UTFT and URTouch libraries made by Henning Karlsen. Here I would like to say thanks to him for the incredible work he has done. The libraries enable really easy use of the TFT Screens, and they work with many different TFT screens sizes, shields and controllers. You can download these libraries from his website, RinkyDinkElectronics.com and also find a lot of demo examples and detailed documentation of how to use them.

After we include the libraries we need to create UTFT and URTouch objects. The parameters of these objects depends on the model of the TFT Screen and Shield and these details can be also found in the documentation of the libraries.

Next we need to define the fonts that are coming with the libraries and also define some variables needed for the program. In the setup section we need to initiate the screen and the touch, define the pin modes for the connected sensor, the led and the button, and initially call the drawHomeSreen() custom function, which will draw the home screen of the program.

So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels  down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.

Ok next is the RGB LED Control example. If we press the second button, the drawLedControl() custom function will be called only once for drawing the graphic of that example and the setLedColor() custom function will be repeatedly called. In this function we use the touch screen to set the values of the 3 sliders from 0 to 255. With the if statements we confine the area of each slider and get the X value of the slider. So the values of the X coordinate of each slider are from 38 to 310 pixels and we need to map these values into values from 0 to 255 which will be used as a PWM signal for lighting up the LED. If you need more details how the RGB LED works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. The rest of the code in this custom function is for drawing the sliders. Back in the loop section we only have the back button which also turns off the LED when pressed.

In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work  you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:

This TFT LCD display can display colour graphics and is a touch sensitive screen. It has an SD card slot too for storing images.This display board can be inserted directly on to the Arduino pins, without using any wires. That’s why it is called a shield.

Wiring is so easy – just plug the display shield on to the Arduino pins. While plugging it in, make sure that the 5V of the LCD goes to the 5V of the Arduino UNO board and also remember to stick a piece of insulation tape on the Arduino’s USB port to avoid short circuits.

Adafruit_GFX library – It’s the core graphics library. Go to Sketch -> Include Library -> Library Manager menu in the Arduino IDE and search for Adafruit_GFX. It can be installed from the library manager or can be downloaded from this link : https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library/archive/master.zip

Adafruit_TFTLCD library – It’s the LCD’s hardware specific library. The original version of the Adafruit_TFTLCD library did not work for me. So, I used a modified version of it. Someone has modified the library for various chipsets and I found it from the arduino forum for my display board. The modified version can be found here : https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=288475.0;attach=107569. Download it to the libraries folder of the Arduino IDE.

It’s better to know the TFT display’s driver ID. To find that out, I wrote a program (available at the end of this note). The program will print the LCD’s driver ID into the serial monitor and will also display colours on the LCD screen.  After uploading the program, just make sure that the  serial monitor is open and the baud rate is set to 9600.

Adafruit_TFTLCD has some examples along with the library. They can be compiled and uploaded to try the display. Examples like tftpaint marks out the point were we touch.

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.

After choosing the right display, It’s time to choose the right controller. If you want to display characters, tests, numbers and static images and the speed of display is not important, the Atmega328 Arduino boards (such as Arduino UNO) are a proper choice. If the size of your code is big, The UNO board may not be enough. You can use Arduino Mega2560 instead. And if you want to show high resolution images and motions with high speed, you should use the ARM core Arduino boards such as Arduino DUE.

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.

You must add the library and then upload the code. If it is the first time you run an Arduino board, don’t worry. Just follow these steps:Go to www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software of your OS. Install the IDE software as instructed.

First you should convert your image to hex code. Download the software from the following link. if you don’t want to change the settings of the software, you must invert the color of the image and make the image horizontally mirrored and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now add it to the software and convert it. Open the exported file and copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are sizes of image. you can change the color of the image in the last input.

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.

In this template, We converted a .jpg image to .c file and added to the code, wrote a string and used the fade code to display. Then we used scroll code to move the screen left. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We used sin(); and cos(); functions to draw Arcs with our desired thickness and displayed number by text printing function. Then we converted an image to hex code and added them to the code and displayed the image by bitmap function. Then we used draw lines function to change the style of the image. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We added a converted image to code and then used two black and white arcs to create the pointer of volumes.  Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We added a converted image and use the arc and print function to create this gauge.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

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)

In this template, We display simple images one after each other very fast by bitmap function. So you can make your animation by this trick.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We just display some images by RGBbitmap and bitmap functions. Just make a code for touchscreen and use this template.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

The four sample codes: DisplayString, DrawGraphic, ShowBMP, and TouchPanel are used to display strings, graphics, pictures in BMP format, and touch pen functions.

Before experimenting with the TouchPanel, the touchscreen must be calibrated according to the displayed prompts. Open the corresponding project, burn the program, and you will be prompted when running:

The demos are developed based on the HAL library. Download the program, find the STM32 program file directory, and open the STM32 with four project folders: DisplayString, DrawGraphic, ShowImage, and Touchscreen.

The four sample codes: DisplayString, DrawGraphic, ShowBMP, and TouchPanel are used to display strings, graphics, pictures in BMP format, and touch pen functions.

Before experimenting with the TouchPanel, the touchscreen must be calibrated according to the displayed prompts. Open the corresponding project, burn the program, and you will be prompted when running:

Voltage type: 5v or 3v voltage input voltage，input is selectable. Because TFT can only work under 3.3 V voltage, so when the input voltage VIN is 5V, need through the 3.3 V voltage regulator IC step down to 3.3V , when the input voltage of 3.3 V, you need to use the zero resistance make J2 short , is equivalent to not through the voltage regulator IC for module and power supply directly.