LCD module SSD1289 with Arduino

Working with touchscreen is always interesting. Everywhere we encounter touchscreen. Hand phones, tablet and many more..
How if we want to create our own touchscreen application with a very popular Arduino board. I am gonna share how to do this….

I am going to use a Funduino Mega 2560 basically same as Arduino Mega 2560.

and 3.2″ LCD Touchscreen. Easy to obtain from ebay or Aliexpress…

It is a 3.2″ TFT LCD Touchscreen with SSD1289 controller with additional SD Card Slot. It has a resolution of 320×240 pixel.

Back view

The pin layout of the LCD Touchscreen as below. Thanks to www.geetech.com for the pin layout.

Below is another pin layout. Actually both are same. Just the from name is different according to manufacturer.

We basically will be using UTFT Arduino library to operate this LCD touchscreen.

Below are the items required for this project;

1. Arduino Mega 2560 or compatible
2. SSD1289 LCD Touchscreen with SD Card slot
3. Arduino 1.0.5 or later IDE
4. UTFT libarary from here —> UTFT link
5. Some jumper wire
6. USB Cable

The first thing to do is to connect IO pins from Arduino Mega to LCD pins. The connection as described below;

DB0 – DB7 –> D37-D30
DB8-DB15 –> D22-D29
RSET–> D41
LED_A–> 5v
CS–> D40
RD–> 3.3v
WR–> D39
RS–> D38
VCC–> 5v
GND–> GND

Once this is done connect the USB cable to computer USB. You will be able to screen the screen power on by displaying white blank screen.

The next step is to load the library to Arduino folder. Copy the extracted UTFT folder to Arduino/Library folder.

Then open ArduinoIDE. Form Examples->UTFT->UTFT_Demo_320x240

Then change the line from

UTFT myGLCD(ITDB32S,38,39,40,41);

to

UTFT myGLCD(SSD1289,38,39,40,41);

Compile and load to arduino. Make sure before compiling the correct arduino model is selected or else there will be an error.

Voila !! There should be some demo images running on you display as below….

This is basic LCD without touchscreen feature..

Stay tuned for my next tutorial on how to make the touch feature work….