SeeedStudio 2.8" TFT Screen with Adafruit's ILI9341 library

There are a ton of very useful shields on the market for Arduinos, but the hardware is just one piece of the puzzle. For example, RadioShack sells SeeedStudio shields, which are pretty well made, but their software libraries have been a little bit rough.

A long while back, I purchased a 2.8" TFT Touch Shield which has laid dormant until I started working on a transponder application for my model rocketry projects. I started out using SeeedStudio's TFT library but it was very slow and not very featureful. For example, sending many draw commands would cause a lot of flickering. You could not change the orientation, either, which is supported by the ILI9341 driver, but not SeeedStudio's library.

After a little bit of searching, I found that Adafruit sells a very similar shield. The key being that the LCD driver chip, the ILI9341, was the same as the SeeedStudio shield. Best of all, Adafruit's driver uses the Adafruit GFX library which is a very nice, and fast, drawing library, with support for many different fonts.

Using the Library

The only real difference between the SeeedStudio shield and Adafruit's is the pin mapping. SeeedStudio has chosen pin 5 as the TFT select pin, and pin 6 as the TFT data/command pin. This means only a tiny change is necessary, as shown in the example below:

#define TFT_DC 6
#define TFT_CS 5

Adafruit_ILI9341 tft = Adafruit_ILI9341(TFT_CS, TFT_DC);

This is pretty great news if you want additional font rendering capabilities, the ability to change orientation, or just overall better performance. Give it a try!