VMA412 LCD display questions

Velleman IO Sensors and Actuators
1

Hi. I’ve got a VMA412 2.8" LCD display. I have two questions:

  1. The display has pins marked 5V and 3.3V. Do I need to power both of them or is this there to let me choose to run the display from either 5V or 3.3V?

  2. Does this display have a built-in character generator? Ie. if I send “A” down the serial line, will it print “A” on the display or do I need something like the Sparkfun LCD Serial Backpack to make this work?

Thanks!

2

Someone? Anyone? This information doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on the net (that I can find).

3

I’m not sure about the voltage (I just plug mine on top of the Arduino)
It seems the library does the character generation.

4

OK thanks very much for the reply. At least that’s something. I’m trying to use this with a Particle Photon, so it sounds like I’ve got some work to do.

5

No problem
I wish I had all of the answers.
Maybe I need to bread board one just to see what it really needs

6

Well that at least answers question 1. I looked up the pinout of the Arduino Uno and it shows 5V and 3.3V adjacent to each other. If you connect this display by dropping it onto the Ardudino, you’re automatically connecting both voltages.

As for the other question, the Arudino GFX library is already available for the Particle Photon as is the ILI9341. I’m guessing all I need now is the Adafruit TFTLCD library from Github. Porting to the Photon is tricky. Sometimes it’s easy, other times it’s frustrating.

7

Dear Michele,

Our libraries and Demo codes can you find on our website or via this link:

Code & library update_08/12/2016

For some demo sketches you’ll need the adafruit library.
The adafruit TFT LCD (Adafruit_GFX.h) can you download on github.
link: Adafruit_GFX.h library

Best regards,
Velleman Support

8

Thanks, yes as I noted above the GFX library is already available for the Photon but the TFTLCD library is not. That would involve porting it from Github. That may or may not be easy - I haven’t tried it yet.

9

This library .zip is from 2016, and is not compatible with the current Arduino IDE library manager. Please make a compatible library available.

10

You could always download a previous version.
I was going to test it on the latest but ran out of time

11

Thanks for your reply, Wrong_Way. So far I’ve followed the instructions in MCUFRIEND_kbv (essentially just copy the MCUFRIEND_kbv folder to my libraries folder), and have successfully manually installed and run the GLUE_Demo_320x240 demo sketch. I’ll work on the examples next, then the touch screen.