How to Use Stonetech Stvc035wt-01 Intelligent Tft Lcd Module With Arduino

Displays have over time, emerged as one of the best ways to drive user interactions on any device. They make it easy to collect inputs and present information (outputs) to users in a graphical, easy to understand format. This usefulness has led to improvements in their quality, with improved resolution and low power features, but almost little has changed when it comes to the complexity of creating beautiful user interfaces for them. This is why the team at STONE Tech created the STVC035WT-01 intelligent Smart display which we will explore for today’s tutorial.

How to Use Stonetech Stvc035wt-01 Intelligent Tft Lcd Module With Arduino

The STONE STVC035WT-01 display is a 16-bit, 3.5″ display with a 320×480 (RGB) resolution, has a 49.0 x 73.4mm viewing area, and pixel spacing of 0.1905mm×0.0635mm (H×V). The display is a Class A industry Panel with an Industry level 4 wire resistance based touch screen, all layered on an integrated CPU, driver, and flash memory with several communication interfaces to enable it to connect to data sources like microcontrollers. For communication with a microcontroller, the display supports serial communication protocols like UART/TTLRS232, and RS485, ensuring it can communicate with any kind of microcontroller or industrial computers. The UART/TTL pin on the Display supports both 3.3v/5v logic level which adds another layer of ease to the use of the display as users need not worry about the need for logic level shifters when building using a microcontroller that operates on either of the voltage level mentioned.

A summary of the features and specification of the display are shown below:

  • Cortex m4 CPU
  • UART interface (RS232/RS485/TTL) ;
  •  256-byte register;
  • 128 kb variable memory;
  • 128 MB flash memory, expandable to 1 GB;
  • GUI design software;
  •  A customized command set;
  • 8-channel curve trend chart memory;
  •  extremely fast variable display response speed;
  • A single-page supports up to 128 display variables;
  • Integrated real-time clock RTC,
  • Touch buzzer sound function;
  • Support software 90 degrees, 180 degrees, 270 degrees screen rotation, adjust the appropriate visual Angle;
How to Use Stonetech Stvc035wt-01 Intelligent Tft Lcd Module With Arduino

One of the major benefits of using this display is its compatibility with the STONE TOOL GUI Designer which allows the development of User Interfaces in a fast and easy manner.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the display, we will build a heart rate monitor using an Arduino Uno with the MAX30100 pulse oximetry and heart rate sensor. The Arduino will serve as the brain of the project and perform the simple task of obtaining the heart rate and blood oxygen data from the MAX30100, displaying it on the screen.

At the end of this tutorial, you would know how to interface Arduino boards with the STONETech displays, and also how to interface sensors like the MAX30100 with the Arduino.

REQUIRED COMPONENTS

The following components are required to build this project;

  • Arduino Uno
  • STVC035WT-01 (or any other STONE Tech display)
  • MAX30100 Pulse Optometry sensor
  • MAX3232
  • Bread Board
  • Jumper Wire
  • Power Bank/Battery with a 9v Jack
REQUIRED COMPONENTS
MAX30100 Sensor

CREATING THE GUI

There are 2 major steps associated with the development of devices using any of the STONEtech displays:

  1. Creating the GUI using the STONE GUI Design Tool and exporting the GUI to the display.
  2. Connecting the display to the microcontroller and writing the code to integrate the microcontroller with the display.

Our development process for today’s project will follow this outline. We will first create the GUI for the project after which we will proceed to write the firmware to interface the microcontroller with the display.

1. Creating The GUI Using The STONE TOOL GUI Designer

There are two major ways of creating a GUI. One is to create the GUI using only the elements (buttons, text boxes, etc) that are available within the GUI Design tool, while the second is to create a mockup image using image editing tools like Photoshop/Paint.NET, import the image into the GUI Desing tool software and place the GUI design elements on the image. For this tutorial, we will go with the second option as it allows more flexibility and gives room for the development of truly beautiful GUIs.

As mentioned during the introduction, today’s tutorial will focus on creating a heart rate and Oxygen-level monitoring system using the display and to get things started, we create the GUI image (shown below) using Photoshop.

How to Use Stonetech Stvc035wt-01 Intelligent Tft Lcd Module With Arduino max30100

The design is quite simple, we illustrate label elements to hold the date, the project title, and the values from the microcontroller. The values from the microcontroller include; the status of the connection between the microcontroller and the display, the heart rate, and the oxygen levels.

With the GUI Image done, we then proceed to import it into the STONE TECH GUI tool. This obviously mean we need to install the STONE TOOL first, so head over to the STONE Tool GUI Designer page and download it. The STONE TOOL software requires no installation and it can be directly opened and run by decompression on your computer.

It should be noted that while compatibility with other OS is currently being considered, the current version of the software only supports Windows 8 and 10 operating systems.

Follow the steps below to create the GUI.

1. With the software downloaded on your computer, launch it and go to File>New Project. This will launch the “New Project dialog box ” where you will be expected to fill in the details of your display, set the storage path, and the name of your project. Since we will use the STVC035WT-01 display which has a  resolution of 320*480 and a default flash space size of 128Mbyte (expandable to 1024MByte), I have entered its details as shown in the image below. If you are using any of the other StoneTech displays, you will need to enter the details of that display instead.

new-project How to Use Stonetech Stvc035wt-01 Intelligent Tft Lcd Module With Arduino

2. Next, on the left side of your screen, you will see the project tree (under the project window) with its assets. Expand the Picture file, and delete the 0.jpg image inside it by right-clicking on it, and selecting “Remove”. For every new project, the 0.jpg file is always created as the default background for your UI, since we will use our background (the one we designed with photoshop), we can delete it.

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