Connect an SPI LCD TFT Display to Your Raspberry Pi Pico With MicroPython - ILI9341 Driver

Adding an LCD screen to your Raspberry Pi Pico projects is always a great feature to have in your tool kit. Whether it's for a user interface display or for a game console it adds that visual feedback that some devices need.

Cheap, SPI based LCD TFT units, with driver chips such as the ILI9341 are easing found on eBay and Amazon and can be simply connected to your Pi Pico with only six GP pins.

In this video I'll show you how to connect the display, download a driver to code it and then run some demos to test that it all works.

0:00 Introduction
1:19 Connection circuit
3:56 Circuit diagram
4:18 Driver package download
5:15 Create PyCharm project
5:40 Cleanup project
6:10 Bouncing Box Demo program
9:24 SPI interface setup
12:40 Using PyCharm to upload the whole project
15:00 Running the demo
18:09 Running other demos
18:45 Conclusions and next steps

Don't forget to check out the project page on my main website at

The library code used can be found at

If you need to get your Raspberry Pi Pico development system set up please check out my Getting Started video at

If you want to pick up an SPI LCD to make this project yourself go to...

Amazon

eBay

[faultyinterface]

Many thanks for the tutorial! Got it up and running so easily, and everything was well explained.

[chadmetzger]

If you were to connect the sd headers to the pico how would you do so?

[EdwardHerskovits]

Would the pico work with the Hosyond 3.5 Inch 480x320 Touch Screen TFT LCD SPI Display Panel? I'm having trouble with locating the equivalents of LED, CS, RESET, DC, and VCC on this display.

[darinp]

Great tutorial!!! I followed it with a 480x320 display. It worked right away, but its shifted left by 160 px....so there's 160px on the right that I can't control and 160px to the left thats off-screen. When I run the bouncing boxes demo, the boxes disappear off to the left, indicating its drawing, then they float back into view. Any thoughts on how to un-shift the display?

[Pepsius]

I really need help, i dont see such setup videos for the pi pico. My problem is that if you go to pycharm, file --> settings --> Languages & Frameworks, there is no "MicroPython". You can also make a Thonny tutorial for the ili9341 driver.

[김하수-jq]

I want to operate on ili9488 instead of ili9341. I tried, but the screen is cut off and printed out. I'd like to ask for advice.

[philoffhistree]

hi, @4:30 you mention the next video will be showing you how to make your own driver, but at the end of the video you say the next video will be how to draw to the screen using bitmaps and the buffer, which is it or is the video covering both, also i have a similar tft lcd screen that connect using this ili9341 driver but its connections are gnd, vcc, scl, sda, rst, dc, cs so was tricky to figure out what wire went where might be a good idea to include both conventions in your tutorials

[hajarou]

Can you tell me how to connect TFT LCD st7735S 1.77" to the raspberry pi pico ?

[Pepsius]

when i click start on any code it cant import like ImportError: can't import name ...

[jackpurdum]

Very well done. I have not used Python but have used C since the late '70s. Any thoughts about using the Arduino IDE, C, and the Pico? The IDE 2.1 supports the Pico.

[davidhill]

Love the videos - please keep them up. Right pace, right depth and been the thing that has got me started with RPi pico. I bought an all in one board, the Waveshare 1.28” LCD with RP2040 chip, and accelerometer built it. The sample code is non-existent and was wondering how I identify what is driving the LCD (it looks like it is an SPI interface) and go about either searching or writing a driver for it? Any help or pointers really appreciated.

[bens]

Many thanks. Would this work with the ILI9488?

[wyngreece]

Did you make the video with the proccess of making your own lcd driver?

[FixationwithCarnage]

how would you connect the sd pins from the display to the pico?

[mahmoudshanaa]

Hello, your content is amazing keep it up.
Do you know a way to display GIF's on the screen display ?

[Pepsius]

I get errors in the script all the time! i dont know why but it seems that alot of files are missing...

[liankruger]

Hi there, can you please explain what file format the images are in this library? I'm trying .raw files that I've converted online but I can't get the images to display. It looks corrupted.

[safwanshaib]

Is ther anyway to use the touch module with pico

[TautologyTechSystems]

Did you ever end up making your video about building a driver from scratch? I have tried to follow your steps in this video, but I'm continually running into various software issues.

[baddabaddabaddaswing]

Do you think the pico could handle playing a 320x240 video on a loop? Thinking of using one to make an arcade cabinet miniature with a video loop of the attract mode of the game.