Silicon Chip – May 2019

(Elliott) #1

86 Silicon chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au


W


hile we were working on
the Diode Curve Plotter
project, published in the
March issue (siliconchip.com.au/Ar-
ticle/11447), we thought that it would
be nice to have a larger display area
for the graphs.
The 5in (13cm) display that we’ve
used with Explore-100 based projects
such as the DAB+/FM/AM radio (Jan-


by Tim Blythman


A low-cost 3.5-inch


touchscreen for the


Arduino & Micromite


We’ve published many projects using 320x240 pixel, 2.8-inch colour


touchscreens. We love them because of their low cost and ease of


use. But sometimes they’re a bit too small! Now we’ve discovered


larger, higher-resolution displays that only cost a bit more and are


almost as easy to drive. Where do you get them... and how do you


use them with an Arduino or Micromite?


uary-March 2019; siliconchip.com.au/
Series/330) is fantastic – but it’s quite
expensive and a bit larger than is re-
ally required for many projects.
There is a similar 4.3in (11cm)
screen, but it’s hardly any cheaper
than the 5in display.
And both the 4.3in and 5in screens
have another problem: they use a par-
allel interface, which takes up a lot

of I/O pins, and the regular Micro-
mite doesn’t have support for paral-
lel displays.
You need to use the Micromite Plus,
which means soldering an SMD mi-
crocontroller.
What we really wanted was a larg-
er, higher-resolution screen that uses
the same serial control interface as the
2.8in (7cm) ILI9341-based screens that
Free download pdf