Have you gazed longingly at large TFT displays – you know what I’m talking about here, 4″, 5″ or 7″ TFTs with up to 800×480 pixels. Then you look at your microcontroller project, but there’s no way it can control a display like that, one that requires 60Hz refresh and 4 MHz pixel clocking. Heck, it doesn’t even have enough pins. I suppose you could move to ARM core processors with TTL display drivers built in but you’ve already got all these shields working and anyways you like small micros you’ve got.
The RA8875 is a powerful TFT driver chip. It is a perfect match for any chip that wants to draw on a big TFT screen but doesn’t quite have the oomph (whether it be hardware or speed). Inside is 768KB of RAM, so it can buffer the display (and depending on the screen size also have double overlaying). The interface is SPI with a very basic register read/write method of communication (no strange and convoluted packets). The chip has a range of hardware-accelerated shapes such as lines, rectangles, triangles, ellipses, built in and round-rects. There is also a built in English/European font set (see the datasheet section 7-4-1 for the font table) This makes it possible to draw fast even over SPI.
Adafruit provides driver code for both CircuitPython and Arduino to help you get using this display quickly and easily.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Open Hardware is In, New CircuitPython and Pi 5 16GB, and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
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