Dear friends welcome to another video! This
is Nick from educ8s.tv and today we are going
to build this small but impressive digital
photo frame using an Arduino. Without any delay, let’s get started!
If you have watched some of my previous videos,
you may have noticed that I use this 1.8”
color TFT display a lot recently. The reason
for that is that this display is very easy
to use, it costs less than $5 and it offers
color! At the back, the display has an SD
card slot, so I thought that we have to learn
how to use that as well. As it turned out,
it is really easy to use the SD card slot
of the display! That makes this display even
better.
The project that we are going to build today
is this. A simple photo frame which loads
images from the SD card. I have placed some
.bmp images in the SD card and the project
loads them and displays them at the display
in full color! As you can see the speed of
the project is very high if we take in consideration
that the brains of this project is the old
and slow Arduino Nano. In my opinion, this
is really impressive. But let’s now see
how to build this project.
The parts needed in order to build this project
are these:
• An Arduino Nano
• A 1.8” Color TFT display
• A small breadboard
• Some wires
• An SD card
The cost of the project is around $15 but
I am sure you already have some of these parts
available so you can build this project with
even less money. You can find link for all
the parts in the description of the video.
Let’s see how to build this project.
In order to use the SD card slot with Arduino
we need to connect these 4 top pins of the
display with Arduino. In have soldered some
female header pins to them and we are ready
to connect them. The SD card module uses the
SPI protocol in order to communicate with
Arduino. So we have to use the hardware SPI
pin of the Arduino Nano. The SD_CS pin goes
to Digital Pin 4. The SD_MOSI pin goes to
Digital Pin 11, the SD_MISO goes to Digital
Pin 12 and lastly the SD_SCK pin goes to digital
pin 13. That’s it. Now we are ready to connect
the bottom pins of the display. In order to
see how to connect the display check the detailed
tutorial I have prepared on that a few months
back. You can click on the card here in order
to watch this video. Both the display and
the SD card module are use the SPI pins so
on some Arduino SPI pins we have connected
two wires! OK, now we are ready to power up
the project. As you can see, everything is
working as expected and the images are displayed
on the screen one after another.
Let’s now see the software side of the project.
In order to achieve that result we have to
use Adafruit’s libraries for the ST7735
display. We also need the Adafruit GFX library.
Adafruit has made an amazing job with the
library for the ST7735. The spitftbitmap example
loads an image from the SD card and displays
it on the display. I slightly modified that
code in order to loop forever, load more images
and use the landscape orientation of the display.
As always you can find the code of the project
in a link in the description of the video.
With the bmpDraw function that the example
offers we can easily load and display bitmap
graphics in our projects! You have to be sure
though, that your bitmaps have the correct
format. In order to convert the images to
correct format for this project, I used the
Paint.net free software for windows. I loaded
my images and then I resized in the correct
resolution for the display which is 160x128
pixels. Then I saved the images as .bmp files
with a bit depth of 24bits. That’s it, all
we have to do now is to save them in the SD
card and call the command bmpDraw with the
name of the file.
As you can see, we very easily build impressive
projects using Arduino. This display has become
my favorite, because it is so easy to use
and offers so much for such a low price. Its
library support is great, so I am going to
use it even more in the near future. I am
going to prepare another tutorial about this
display soon, in order to see how to load
graphics, and how to draw simple shapes. I
would love to hear your opinion about this
display. Do you use it in your projects? If
so, do you have any tricks to share with us?
Please post your comments in the comments
section below. Thanks!
If this is your first time here, I would love
to have you subscribed. In this channel I
post videos about DIY projects every Saturday.
I love making things and I believe that anyone
can make things, anyone can become a maker.
That’s why I created this channel, in order
to share my knowledge with the community and
learn from the community. I hope you will
join us. Until next Saturday, Watch, Learn,
Build!
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