Harvested 7" TFT w/touch

Hardware
1

I pulled a 7" TFT touchscreen with 4-wire resistive touch from an old GPS unit. I’d like to make this work with BrewPi on either an Arduino or Photon (I have a couple ordered). I have the data sheet but I don’t know where to go from here. Adafruit has a nice SPI -> 40-pin TFT module, but this display has a 30 pin connection. It’s pretty old (2005) so it may not be worth it. Thoughts?

2

Hi,

The Arduino will not have enough processing power/space to drive the tft display.
To get another display working on the Photon you would need to:

  • Find a way to connect it to the photon
  • Write a new low level display driver for eGUI
  • Write a new low level touch screen driver eGUI
  • Rewrite the GUI for the native resolution of your display

Our shield does more than just drive the display, it also:

  • Does 3.3V --> 5V conversion for SSR outputs
  • It has a OneWire bus master for reliable OneWire communication
  • It has an RS485 driver to talk to expand with sensors that do not have OneWire later
  • It has a DC-DC converter, so you can power it from a 12V power supply
  • It has a lot of connectors to make it easy to connect your SSRs and sensors
  • It has a buzzer for alarms

But if you want to prototype your own system using your display, you know where to look.

4