Setting up Cheap Color Display with Arduino (Nokia 1661) Leave a comment

Introduction

Nothing can make our projects look as good as a color graphical display! However, it’s always the price that limits our designs. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to set up an inexpensive color display with Arduino. We’ve previously talked about the Nokia 1661 display on EICUT, but this time our focus will be solely on Arduino — using the popular Adafruit library to run this display. Moreover, we’ll be using a library that supports hardware SPI on the ESP8266, along with a ready‑to‑use board, so you can get this LCD working more easily than ever. So, stay with Eicut as we dive into this practical tutorial.

Hardware

The display we’re using is originally designed for Nokia mobile phones, and because it’s mass‑produced, it’s very affordable. This display is found in phones like Nokia 1661, Nokia 1616, and etc.To obtain the display itself, you’ll need to visit mobile parts vendors, not typical electronics stores.

In this tutorial, we’re using a ready‑made module of this display, which you can purchase from Store.

With this module, you can easily and effortlessly set up the display on your board.

You can review the features of this display below:

• Supports 65,000 colors
• 1.8‑inch size
• 128 × 160 resolution

Setting Up the Adafruit spfd54124b Library

In fact, spfd54124b is the display driver, which directly controls the LCD.

This driver supports the 9‑bit SPI protocol, while — as you know — most microcontrollers only support 8‑bit SPI.

In this library, the SPI interface for AVR microcontrollers has been implemented in software and optimized for performance.

However, the popular ESP8266 module (the NodeMCU board) does support 9‑bit SPI, allowing you to display data on the LCD at high speed.

Next, we’ll review how to use this library.

Now open the Arduino software, and from the menu go to

Sketch → Include Library → Add .ZIP Library,

then select the ZIP file you downloaded earlier.

After that, you also need to install the Adafruit GFX library.

To do this, go to

Sketch → Include Library → Manage Libraries,

find and install the Adafruit GFX library.

Now we want to test this library with the NodeMCU board.

To do this, simply open the corresponding example from the library.

As you can see, there are several ready‑made examples for working with the library:

• hw_spi_arduino_uno: Setup using hardware SPI with the Arduino Uno board
• hw_spi_esp8266: Setup using hardware SPI with the NodeMCU (ESP8266) board
• sw_spi_arduino_uno: Setup using software SPI with the Arduino Uno board
• sw_spi_esp32: Setup using software SPI with the ESP32 board
• sw_spi_esp8266: Setup using software SPI with the NodeMCU (ESP8266) board

Next, you can see the schematic diagrams corresponding to each example.

To initialize the display in hardware SPI mode, you only need to define the RST and CS pins as follows:

If you’re using software SPI, then all SPI pins must be specified:

Below, you can see the output result of the code above.

Color Display Setup

Available Drawing Functions for the Display

You can use all the functions from the Adafruit GFX library with this LCD.

Below are a few examples:

Screen Rotation

This function sets the drawing orientation on the display surface.

You can assign a value from 0 to 3:

Draw a Pixel

This function draws a single pixel at the specified (x, y) coordinates with the chosen color:

Draw a Line

This function draws a line by specifying its starting and ending points, and a color:

Draw a Rectangle

These functions are used to draw outlined or filled rectangles at specified (x, y) coordinates, with the desired width, height, and color:

Draw a Circle

These functions are used to draw a circle at a specified (x, y) center point with a chosen radius and color:

Draw a Rounded Rectangle

These functions are used to draw rectangles with rounded corners, either outlined or filled.

You need to specify the starting (x, y) coordinates, width, height, corner radius, and color:

Draw a Triangle

These functions are used to draw triangles, either outlined or filled, by specifying the three corner coordinates and a color:

Draw a Character

This function displays a single character at specified (x, y) coordinates, with chosen text color, background color, and font size:

Text Handling

These functions are used for text rendering and formatting — positioning, coloring, sizing, and wrapping:

To select a specific font, use:

Available Fonts

Here is the list of available fonts you can include:

Using Fonts in the Adafruit SPFD54124B Library

Before using any font in your code, you must include it at the beginning of your sketch along with the required libraries.

Here’s an example:

FAQ – Setting up Cheap Color Display with Arduino (Nokia 1661)