Arduino Colour TFT Shield

Arduino Colour TFT Shield

If you ever wanted to add a top quality display to your Arduino project then this shield is for you. Comprising a 128x160 TFT colour display with 18-bit colour, a micro-SD card slot for reading/writing data and a 5-way jog switch (joystick) for menu navigation.

The TFT display uses SPI to communicate with the Arduino so is superfast. We have used the excellent 1.8 in TFT screen from Adafruit which has a wide viewing angle (unlike STN displays), high-quality colour and a high refresh rate. A full graphics library and example code for Arduino is freely available (see links at the bottom of page).

A five way joy switch on the board allows for easy menu navigation (Up, Down, Left, Right and push Select). A resistor network on the board produces a different voltage for each switch selection so only one Arduino pin is required for the switch input.

A micro-SD card slot is provided on the board. This can be used to load bitmap graphics for display on the screen but is not limited to that function. It can be used by the Arduino board for any file input/output.

This TFT shield is based on Adafruit's 1.8" TFT Shield design (www.adafruit.com/products/358) and display driver code.

Features

• 1.8in TFT colour display 128x160 pixels with 18-bit colour (262,144 shades)
• micro-SD card slot
• 5-way jog switch for menu navigation
• On-board 3.3V 500mA low-dropout voltage regulator to power the display and micro-SD card
• 5V to 3.3V level shifting on SPI pins so shield can be used with 5V or 3V systems without modification.
• Turn backlight on and off or control backlight brightness using Arduino PWM output - from 0 (off) to 255 (full).
• Works in both Landscape and Portrait modes with one simple command
• Arduino Reset Switch

The board comes fully assembled and tested so you can be sure of a fully working shield, but comes without the header pins soldered on. Header pins are supplied in the pack though.

The TFT Shield uses the following connections.

Jog Switch

The Jog switch output is connected to analog pin A0 via a resistor network which provides the following (approximate) voltages and ADC values (based on 5V supply)

Video

See it in action running the demo program

Documents

To test out the functionality we recommend downloading our example sketch which shows the features of the screen and is menu driven using the Jog switch. The Adafruit GFX and ST7735 library need to be downloaded and installed into the arduino libraries folder.

TFT Shield Schematic
Example Arduino Sketch (menu driven)
Adafruit GFX Graphics Library for Arduino
Adafruit ST7735 Library and example programs
TFT Shield Eagle CAD files