[Andy Brown] composed in to show off the TFT LCD adapter he’s been working on for linking economical screens to an Arduino Mega.

These TFT LCD screens can be picked up on eBay for a few dollars. but they’re a lot more suited for 16-bit microcontrollers which operate at 3.3V levels. His adapter board, which plugs directly into the Mega’s dual-row pin header, makes it much easier to control these with an 8-bit chip that is running at 5V.

There’s a couple of things that make this happen. first off, he’s included level converter chips to handled the 3.3V/5V issues. Second, he uses latch chips to translate eight pins on the Arduino Mega to sixteen pins on the display. Those chips have a latch pin which holds the output values in memory while the input pins are changed. He manages to drive the latch on just one of the chips using the chip select (CS) line required by the LCD protocol. This indicates you don’t lose any extra pins.

Another way to uses the screens with Arduino is to use a smart controller for TFT screens.