Connections with Arduino UNO and similar - sumotoy/TFT_ILI9163C GitHub Wiki

All ILI9163C at the time I'm writing this are working at 3v3 logic levels, this mean that arduino UNO and similar cannot work on out the box with this display! Despite what I've readed around, the datasheet is clear, ILI9163C will not support 5V logic levels!

Can work at 5v logic level? ----> NO I have performed a simple test with 2 display I have here with damaged backlight, drived at 5V logic level directly from arduino UNO and results was: Both worked but one stopped after a couple of hours and never get back (fried forever), the other worked for 5 hours, than I've seen some garbage on screen, made a power cycle and worked again Why survived? Probably because my USB doesn't provide 5V but 4.75, plus there's a cheap protection diode (not a skottky) on my nano chinese clone board so there's another 0.7 v dropoff, at the end I got around 4v!. This probably is not enough to fry the ILI but of course it work well over range and it can die soon or later. In short, do not trust who say ILI is 5V compatible, it's not and I've experienced it!

Confusion around voltage level and supply I got some users claim to power from an arduino at 3V3 but driving it directly, convinced that it's safe (since worked). At the time I'm writing this all boards around seems have a cheap but low dropoff regulator for converting 5V to 3V3, powering at 3V3 should bypass regulator (there's some dropoff and depends of how cheap is the board), but this have nothing to do with logic levels! You can power ILI at 5V or 3V3 but logic levels are always 3V3 max! Guaranteed!

How to convert logic levels from Arduino UNO to ILI? Stay away from ebay mosfet logic converter or specialized chip like the texas one or (worst!) resistor divisor, zener and so on, ILI9163C works at very high speed and those solution produced very poor waveform (if you have nothing else in your lab you can use with UNO since has very low speed SPI) A decent solution is HFC4050 or similar, powered at 3v3 between UNO (or similar) and ILI9163C! See an example that use multi instance in arduino nano https://github.com/sumotoy/TFT_ILI9163C/wiki/Proof-of-concept

Schematics come soon...