Affordable touch screen controller to add to your next project
Don M
Posts: 1,652
Just got an email today showing these controllers. Very attractive price points as compared to 4D Systems displays.
http://imall.iteadstudio.com/display/nextion.html
http://imall.iteadstudio.com/display/nextion.html
Comments
PROs: cheap color touchscreen with embedded processor that does the heavy lifting and requires only TX/RX pins. It also has a PC-based GUI creator that downloads high-level graphic elements (fonts, pics, menus, etc) to 4MB of onboard storage.
CONs: The full specifications of the command set and the downloadable flash format do not seem to be available.
The GUI creator only runs on Windows (which I don't use), so I can't (won't ?) evaluate that, but for me the apparent proprietariness of the whole shebang is the showstopper. Hopefully, the full docs are just not done yet, and will be forthcoming, but until that happens, I can't recommend it.
Smallest ones look cheap, but at 4.3" I think the price has climbed to make this a better choice
http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1848/PF261641#
- 4.3" cap-touch screen for ~$49 & just more of everything.
Currently listed on their site as this:
http://imall.itead.cc/nextion-nx2432t043.html
Overview
Nextion is a Seamless Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution that
provides a control and visualisation interface between a human and a
process, machine, application or appliance. It is the best solution to
replace the traditional LCD and LED Nixie tube.
This solution includes hardware part - a series of TFT boards and
software part - Nextion editor. Nextion TFT board uses only one serial
port to do communicating. Let you get rid of the wiring trouble. We
notice that most engineers spend much time in application development
but get unpleasant results. In this situation, Nextion editor has mass
components such as button, text, progress bar, slider, instrument panel
etc. to enrich your interface design. And the drag-and-drop function
ensures that you spend less time in programming, which will reduce your
99% development workloads. With the help of this WYSIWYG editor, GUI
designing is a piece of cake.
It's easy to adapt Nextion family HMI to existing projects, you just need to provide it a UART.
NX2432T043 is a powerful 4.3'' HMI, which is member of Nextion
family. Features include: a 4.3" TFT 480x272 resistive touch screen
display, 16M Flash, 2KByte RAM, 65k colors.
Features
I have mine and have played around with it some. It is very simple to control.
It appears to use memory swapping into the video memory to display changed buttons and "graphics"
Anyhow, they have some Arduino stuff online to make use of the boards. I have one I am playing with by manually typeing into the serial port.
Rodney