Touchscreen Pin outs

New to Arduino and I am working on a project for work. We have Air Conditioned Fan Coil Units that control the Temperature and Humidity in our IS Server Rooms. I am attempting to design a Temp/Humidity replacement Controller that uses a TFT Touchscreen to interface with the Arduino. Anyone know of a good reference to explain the function of each pin on a TFT Touchscreen and how to connect it to the micro controller? Looking for 8 bit and SPI. Also, if anyone knows of a similar project that has already been designed your help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Brian

It might be useful to know which TFT Touchscreen you have as they often use different driver chips etc. Also, what Arduino are you using and how are you connecting the two together - I would strongly recommend using a shield.

Cheers

Although knowing the LCD model may be helpful, you need to know the controller really to find the right library for it. I'm currently working on a few LCDs here myself, and ran across the best candidate for "universal LCD library" here:

http://henningkarlsen.com/electronics/library.php?id=52

Download that and plink around a little with it and see if it supports your panel. From the looks of the shield pin labels, it supports 8 bit latched mode and possibly serial mode also. That should narrow things down a bit for you. I'd speculate there's a better than 50/50 chance that library supports your controller.

I did casullay look around to see if I could spot someone else selling it that was providing more information. Considering it's in arduino shield format, I was expecting to find it being sold more formally somewhere. (like at adafruit or makershed etc) but was surprised to not really find a good match. I did find a slightly different size of LCD panel (2.4" iirc?) that had the exact same area labels on the bottom of the touch cover, but it did't look like a good lead.

Nice find though on the panel. That's a good price on a 2.8 TFT wth touch, on a shield. Hope you get it working, report back with success stories, we like to hear those. :wink:

One thing I would be careful with... quite a few of those have 3.3v logic on their controllers, and require level shifting if you're not using a 3.3v due. (particularly the parallel ones, which this is) I don't see any level shifting resistors or ICs on that shield. That one may be permanently damaged by installing it on a 5v uno or mega etc, even though the seller says otherwise. Try to hold off on attaching and powering it up until you are a little more certain about what you're dealing with.

hum... did one last sweep around and found this, it looks VERY promising. The board's a different run/color, but the pinout looks the same, the front looks the same, AND the demo on the screen ("DEADBEEF") is the same. I'd be willing to bet that one is functionally identical to yours. I don't see spfd5408 listed on the uTFT site though. That auction is for the lcd AND an uno. I'd recommend messaging the seller and ask them for a link to the library so you can check it out.

also COLOR 2.6" TFT LCD Shield With Touch Screen AND Arduino UNO Board-See Live Video - YouTube (again with the DEADBEEF)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261120303957 "Simply plug it in and load up our library - you'll have it running in under 10 minutes!" Too bad they don't link their library???

ok one last dig-up before bed.
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=139763.5;wap2
"Womarts provided a zip file with sample code when I asked them. It's 23 MB "
(poooosibly Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.)
judging by how coy they are being with that download in several of the places I spotted it, they probably don't want to allow their competitors to hotlink to it.... gnite.

If you are using UTFT Library then have a look at the difference between print, printNumI and printNumF.