Embedded Systems and Power Electronics

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I am currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley, following a 6-year journey working at Apple after my undergrad years at Cornell University. I grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh where my interest in electronics was cultivated, resulting in the creation of this blog.

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Showing posts with label graphics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label graphics. Show all posts

Oct 30, 2014

Interfacing a color TFT display with the PIC32MX250F128B


I have been working on interfacing the PIC32MX250F128B with a small 2.2" TFT display from Adafruit. It's a nice little display that is fairly easy to communicate with, using SPI communication. The display I'm using is: http://www.adafruit.com/product/1480

Adafruit provides nice open-source libraries for their products. However, they are for Arduino and thus cannot be directly reused for the PIC32. I went through the library and ported it over for the PIC32, in C. I have attached my project file as a .zip file and you can download it to go through the library header and source files, as well as the demo code. I've tried heavily commenting the code so that it is self-explanatory.

As far as hardware goes, with the demo code, the pin connections for the display are:

BL (backlight): I left it unconnected, but you can connect it to 3.3V for backlight.
SCK: connected to RB14 on the PIC
MISO: left unconnected, since I'm not reading anything from the screen
MOSI: connected to RB11 on the PIC
CS: connected to RB1 on the PIC
SDCS: left unconnected as I'm not using the microSD card for this
RST: connected to RB2 on the PIC
D/C: connected to RB0 on the PIC
VIN: connected to 3.3V supply
GND: connected to gnd

The pins I used are defined in the code and you can easily change them as required.

I used my custom proto-board for testing on a breadboard. You can find details here: http://tahmidmc.blogspot.com/2014/02/pic32-proto-board-details-schematic-pcb.html


Here's a video showing the PIC32 running the demo code and doing some simple graphics on the screen. You can see that it runs fairly quickly and quite smoothly.


Project files with all source and header files:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4SoPFPRNziHdksweU1vUkZ4SHM/view?usp=sharing
http://www.4shared.com/zip/O-LcEU0Ace/Adafruit_TFTX.html

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, do let me know!