Display Custom Bitmap Graphics on an Arduino Touch Screen and Other Arduino Compatible Displays

Displaying a custom image or graphic on a LCD display is a very useful task as displays are now a premium way of providing feedback to users on any project. With this functionality, we can build projects that display our own logo, or display images that help users better understand a particular task the project is performing, providing an all-round improved User Experience (UX) for your Arduino or ESP8266 based project. Today’s tutorial will focus on how you can display graphics on most Arduino compatible displays.

DISPLAY CUSTOM BITMAP GRAPHICS ON AN ARDUINO TOUCH SCREEN AND OTHER ARDUINO COMPATIBLE DISPLAYS

The procedure described in this tutorial works with all color displays supported by Adafruit’s GFX library and also works for displays supported by the TFTLCD library from Adafruit with little modification. Some of the displays on which this procedure works include:

While these are the displays we have, and on which this tutorial was tested, we are confident it will work perfectly fine with most of the other Arduino compatible displays.

For each of the displays mentioned above, we have covered in past how to program and connect them to Arduino. You should check those tutorials, as they will give you the necessary background knowledge on how each of these displays works.

For this tutorial, we will use the 2.8″ ILI9325 TFT Display which offers a resolution of 320 x 340 pixels and we will display a bitmap image of a car.

REQUIRED COMPONENTS

To demonstrate how this works with different displays, you can use some of the most popular displays:

  1. Color OLED 
  2. 1.44″ TFT 
  3. 1.8″ TFT ST7735 
  4. 2.8″ Touch Screen  
  5. 3.5″ Color TFT
  6. Arduino Uno

As usual, each of the components listed above can be bought from the links attached to them. While having all of the displays listed above may be useful, you can use just one of them for this tutorial.

Schematics

To demonstrate how things work, we will use the 2.8″ TFT Display. The 2.8″ TFT display comes as a shield which plugs directly into the Arduino UNO as shown in the image below.

Schematic Display Custom Bitmap Graphics on an Arduino Touch Screen and Other Arduino Compatible Displays

Not all Arduino displays are available as shields, so when working with any of them, connect the display as you would when displaying text (we recommend following the detailed tutorial for the display type you use of the above list). This means no special connection is required to display graphics.

With the screen connected, we then proceed to prepare the graphics images to be displayed.

Preparing the Graphics

Before an image is displayed on any of the Arduino screens, it needs to be converted to a C compatible hex file and that can only happen when the image is in bitmap form. Thus, our first task is to create a bitmap version of the graphics to be displayed or convert the existing image to a bitmap file. There are several tools that can be used for creation/conversion of bitmap images including, Corel Draw and Paint.net, but for this tutorial, we will use the Paint.net.

For More Details: Display Custom Bitmap Graphics on an Arduino Touch Screen and Other Arduino Compatible Displays

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top