Dear friends welcome back. This is Nick
and today we will learn how to use the
popular 1.8 inch colour TFT
display with Arduino. Let's start.
So far, in most of our projects we were using the
Nokia 5110 LCD display which is great
but what if we need a bigger display
that can display colours and it is very
cheap as well? Then we need the ST7735S TFT LCD display. It is a 1.8'
display, it has a resolution of 160x128 pixels and it can display 260.000 colours, it is
very easy to use with Arduino and it costs around $5. Υou can find a link in the
description of the video if you want to
buy it. The display uses the SPI protocol in
order to communicate with Arduino. We
only need to connect
8 wires in order to make it work. The TFT
module also contains an SD card reader
but we won't be using it today. I will
make another video on that. Let's now
connect the display to Arduino. The first pin is VCC. VCC goes to Arduino 5V.
The second pin is GND. GND goes to Arduino GND.
The third pin is pin CS.
CS goes to digital pin 10.
The next pin is RESET. RESET goes to digital pin 8.
The next pin is DC. DC goes to digital pin 9.
The next pin goes to digital pin 11,
the next pin to digital pin 13. The last pin which is named LED, goes to Arduino 3.3V.
Let's now connect power and see if it is working. The LED is starting.
As you can see, the display is working just fine.
Let's see what the library we use can do. As you can see
it can draw lines, it can draw symbols,
rectangles, squares, circles
and so on. Now let's go the computer to see
what kind of software we need in order
to drive this display. The software side
of the project is even easier than
the hardware. All we have to do is to go to
examples, load Arduino TFT display text example.
This example displays the analog
value of analog pin 0 on the display.
It is the simplest example possible and that library does not use much RAM memory.
If you want to use a more capable library which uses more RAM, you can use the Adafruit library.
First, we have to download it.
We go to Sketch, Add Library, Manage Libraries and we download the Adafruit ST7735 library
along with the Adafruit GFX Library.
Then, we restart the Arduino IDE and we go to File, Examples, Adafruit ST7735 library
and we load the graphic test example.
It is the program that we saw running at the beginning of the video.
We make a small change here: Reset pin is pin 8 and DC pin is pin 9, bacause we have connected it this way.
Next, we press upload and we are ready to go!
You can experiment with the functions that the library uses and make impressive things very easily!
As you can see, using the 1.8' colour TFT display with Arduino is extremely easy.
The low cost of the display allows us to use it in many projects. I have many in mind.
What kind of projects do you want me to build with this display? Please post your comments and ideas
in the comments section below.
If this is your first time here, I would
love to have you subscribed. In this channel i post
DIY hardware and software projects
every Saturday. I love making things and
helping other people doing the same. I
hope you will join our community.
Thank you very much for watching this video
and I will see you next Saturday!
