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I have spent the last few days attempting to connect the screen I purchases for this product to my Arduino Nano. It turns out that it is more complex that I thought. The screen I bought is a generic 2.4″ TFT LCD screen, which supports both 3.3V and 5V logic, so it should work fine with the Arduino Nano (which is a 5V device).

After wiring it up, I was getting nothing on the screen. I have tried various libraries, including the Adafruit Libraries (Their Core Library is HERE, and I tried both THIS and THIS library as well). I also tried many other libraries.

The code was successfully picking up on the ID of the chip driver, 9341, and, oddly, I was getting correct output on the screen when I pressed the reset button and reset the device, (but only for a second) so I don’t believe that this is a wiring issue. A note for anyone else using Adafruits code: I noticed that the code will not be able to read the correct ID from the chip unless a delay of about 500 ms is added after the reset command, like this:

tft.reset();
delay(500);
uint16_t identifier = tft.readID();

This may just be a faulty screen, but I suspect the build quality of these types of devices isn’t great. They are cheaper than the models available from sites like Adafruit, but you tend to pay for that with the additional time required to get the device to work.

I don’t have any more time to spend trying to get this to work, so I have just bought an Adafruit 2.2″ TFT LCD display which should be a lot easier to work with, since the drivers and examples were written for this device (A lot of the drivers out there are hacks or modifications of the official Adafruit drivers).

I have just learned that the Arduino Due, which I have, is compatible with all shields from the Arduino UNO that can be run at 3.3V, so I can try it on the Due and see if I can get it to work there. It is possible that having all those long wires connected to a breadboard is causing issues, or perhaps there are additional pins that need to be wired up with this model? If it works on the Due, I can at least use this for prototyping and testing in the future, and use the Adafruit model for my thermal scanner project. The Adafruit model is not a shield, and so may work better on a breadboard. It also supports SPI, which means it can use fewer pins, at the cost of speed.

I also got my Logic Level Shifter and RAM chip, which I intend to use to store the array of temperature values from the thermal imager (They won’t fit in the 2K of RAM that the Nano has by default).