Hardware to use in an Embedded graphics system

Explore STM32 Discovery boards with LCD modules, touch capabilities, debug signals, and powerful Cortex M7 microcontrollers.

32F429IDISCOVERY board

First, the 32F429IDISCOVERY Discovery Kit, which is based on the STM32F429ZI microcontroller.

32F429IDISCOVERY Discovery kit is the exact part name of that board and you can search for that in Google. The board is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. 32F429IDISCOVERY Discovery kit with STM32F429ZI MCU

It has a 2.8-inch LCD module with resistive touch capability.
This board also has got various debug signals exposed on this board, which is important for us, because if something is not working, then we have to trace various signals like display signals, and touch signals. That’s why I have chosen this board.

The main reasons to choose this board are two.

It has the onboard LCD module with touch capability.
The second important reason is, various debug signals have been exposed on the board.

And this will be our main board throughout this course.

32F746GDISCOVERY board

Next is the 32F746GDISCOVERY Discovery kit, which is based on the STM32F746NG microcontroller.

STM32 Discovery boards — Figure 2. 32F746GDISCOVERY Discovery kit(STM32F746NG MCU)

It is a Cortex M7 based board.
It has got a 4.3-inch LCD module with capacitive touch capability.

The drawback of this board is, the ST has not exposed such debug signals on the board. So, it is very hard to develop an application for such boards where the debug signals are not exposed. If something went wrong, we would not have any idea what was going wrong. You don’t have the pins to connect the oscilloscope or the logic analyzer to trace the signals.

And in this code, I will also show you how you can write the application, I mean, the graphics application for this board as well.

It’s your decision whether to buy a 32F429IDISCOVERY board or a 32F746GDISCOVERY board because the 32F746GDISCOVERY board may look more attractive than the former. This is because it is based on Cortex M7 and is more powerful with additional features compared to the 32F429IDISCOVERY board. Therefore, the choice is yours on which board to buy.

STM32F7508-DK board

There is also one more board, that is STM32F7508-DK, which is also based on Cortex M7, the microcontroller is STM32F750N8, and this is similar to this board(option 2). You can also use such boards.

STM32F4DISCOVERY board

Here you can also use a STM32F4DISCOVERY board and SPI-based touchscreen LCD module combinations, as shown in Figure 4.

Some of you may already have a STM32F4DISCOVERY board. This is the main board we commonly use in all other courses on microcontrollers. That’s why, in this course, I will also support the STM32F407 microcontroller based Discovery kit, and this board doesn’t come with an onboard LCD module. That’s why you have to buy a separate LCD module.

You may use the SPI based touchscreen LCD module, which is based on ILI9341 LCD Driver. Such LCD modules can be used with this board. It must be SPI based.

So, I’ll only support the SPI-based external LCD module which is based on ILI9341 LCD Driver Chip.

Best hardware for Embedded Graphics — Figure 4. STM32F4DISCOVERY Discovery kit with STM32F407VG MCU

All these are low-cost components, you can easily get in the market.

NUCLEO-F4x STM32 Nucleo-64 development board

If you already have a NUCLEO board, you can continue using the NUCLEO board as well with the same combination. You just have to buy one external display and you have to drive that display using SPI communication.