Your board comes with a lovely TFT display built right in. You can use the display with CircuitPython and the displayio module. This module allows you to easily write Python code that lets you create graphics.
CircuitPython Usage
To use with CircuitPython, you need to first install the adafruit_display_text library, and its dependencies, into the lib folder on your CIRCUITPY drive. Then you need to update code.py with the example script.
Thankfully, we can do this in one go. In the example below, click the Download Project Bundle button below to download the necessary libraries and the code.py file in a zip file. Extract the contents of the zip file, and copy the entire lib folder and the code.py file to your CIRCUITPY drive.
Your CIRCUITPY/lib folder should contain the following folders:
- /adafruit_display_text
- /adafruit_bitmap_font
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2021 ladyada for Adafruit Industries
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
"""
This test will initialize the display using displayio and draw a solid green
background, a smaller purple rectangle, and some yellow text.
"""
import board
import terminalio
import displayio
from adafruit_display_text import label
# First set some parameters used for shapes and text
BORDER = 20
FONTSCALE = 2
BACKGROUND_COLOR = 0x00FF00 # Bright Green
FOREGROUND_COLOR = 0xAA0088 # Purple
TEXT_COLOR = 0xFFFF00
display = board.DISPLAY
# Make the display context
splash = displayio.Group()
display.root_group = splash
color_bitmap = displayio.Bitmap(display.width, display.height, 1)
color_palette = displayio.Palette(1)
color_palette[0] = BACKGROUND_COLOR
bg_sprite = displayio.TileGrid(color_bitmap, pixel_shader=color_palette, x=0, y=0)
splash.append(bg_sprite)
# Draw a smaller inner rectangle
inner_bitmap = displayio.Bitmap(
display.width - BORDER * 2, display.height - BORDER * 2, 1
)
inner_palette = displayio.Palette(1)
inner_palette[0] = FOREGROUND_COLOR
inner_sprite = displayio.TileGrid(
inner_bitmap, pixel_shader=inner_palette, x=BORDER, y=BORDER
)
splash.append(inner_sprite)
# Draw a label
text = "Hello World!"
text_area = label.Label(terminalio.FONT, text=text, color=TEXT_COLOR)
text_width = text_area.bounding_box[2] * FONTSCALE
text_group = displayio.Group(
scale=FONTSCALE,
x=display.width // 2 - text_width // 2,
y=display.height // 2,
)
text_group.append(text_area) # Subgroup for text scaling
splash.append(text_group)
while True:
pass
Once everything is saved to the CIRCUITPY drive, you should see the graphics test start on the display.
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