Great little device! Vivid colors, Crisp image. Very readable.

I speak of the Hobbytronics 1.8" TFT display with microSD socket, £24 inc VAT, but excl p&p, July 15... and still £24 at 10/17!

A SIMILAR device is available from Adafruit, $20, 7/15. N.B. I have not "played" with one of those.

I did a separate page for getting started with Hobbytronics serial connected 1.8 inch TFT display. It tells you about connecting the three wires (power, ground, and one data line!), and takes you through a "Hello World" first program.

The device isn't "just" for microprocessors. It could be hooked up to a "big" computer, too, easily enough.

Using the card's SD card

There's a set of commands for the device, neatly set out at the Hobbytronics page. Using them is explained at my page using the commands for the Hobbytronics TFT display. The material there is slightly relevant to this page, but you may be able to skip it.

Images from the card in the microSD socket...

Once you have a memory card in the microSD socket, with a .bmp file called MyImage.bmp already saved on it (see below for more on that), you can, adapted as below, use the line in the demo that (nearly) says...

tft_command(13,120,85,"MyImage.bmp");

Note: You do NOT have to use an SD card at all. You an send text and graphics to the display over the serial connection already discussed. If you decide to "go" the "card" route....

-- The card must be formatted fat16 (despite limitations of the format)(ext4 doesn't seem to work for the display's wants.), and....

-- The card must have a bitmap of the right size on it, and....

-- The bitmap must have been saved with a 32bit color depth....

Meet those conditions, and you should be okay!

(I presume... but I haven't tried it... that you can have several bitmaps on the SD card, and change them as you wish with code, e.g.... (untested pseudo-code...))

if ((ButtonA Pressed)) then tft_command(13,120,85,"PressedA.bmp");if ((ButtonB Pressed)) then tft_command(13,120,85,"PressedB.bmp");if (((ButtonA Pressed=False) AND (ButtonB Pressed=False))) then tft_command(13,120,85,"PressedNone.bmp");

I don't, immediately, have an answer for you to "how do I convert my image to the right color depth." I had a look at my favorite image "Swiss Army Knife", Irfan Viewer (free! (Windows))... and didn't immediately find the necessary tool.... but I suspect it is there somewhere. Of course, many, many software tools should be able to manage this simple task. I hope already have one on your machine, if you do anything with images.

=======
I'm told you can also write data to the card. Links to explanations of this would be welcome! (I suspect you just use "the usual" routines.)

Ad from page's editor: Yes.. I do enjoy compiling these things for you... hope they are helpful. However.. this doesn't pay my bills!!! If you find this stuff useful, (and you run an MS-DOS or Windows PC) please visit my freeware and shareware page, Sheepdog Software (tm), download something, and circulate it for me? At least (please) send an 'I liked the parallel port use page, and I'm from (country/ state)' email? (No... I don't do spam.) Links on your page to this page would also be appreciated!

Page tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org

....... P a g e . . . E n d s .....