STM32 Nucleo Shield display board to simplify the GUI design of ultra-low-power devices

STMicroelectronics' newly launched STM32 * Nucleo Shield display board pioneered the human-machine interface of IoT products. The new SPI Shield display board X-NUCLEO-GFX01M1 utilizes the economy of the STM32G0 microcontroller (MCU) to support the introduction of the latest version of TouchGFX software (version 4.15.0) with new features such as low-cost non-memory mapped SPI flash IC support.

If you use STM32G0 and TouchGFX to develop projects, developers can add a small graphical interface screen to any project at a cost of only $5 in the bill of materials, so that simple devices such as timers, controllers, and household appliances can also bring similar intelligence to users Mobile phone experience.

The new X-Nucleo-GFX01M1 Shield display board supports the new X-cube-display software package, which provides a simple "hello world" interface example. This Shield board integrates a 2.2-inch QVGA (320x240) SPI display, 64 Mbit SPI NOR flash memory and a control handle. It can be used with various STM32 MCU development boards such as NUCLEO-G071RB. STM32G071RB is a mainstream Arm® Cortex®-M0+ MCU integrates up to 128KB flash memory, 36KB SRAM, various communication interfaces, analog peripherals, fast I/O ports, hardware security ID and a USB Type-C™ Power Delivery controller.

The latest version of TouchGFX software is based on the partial frame buffering method of the TouchGFX engine, which can reduce the RAM space occupied by the GUI by up to 90% and allows a simple user interface to be implemented in only 16-20KB of MCU RAM memory. The new version of the software adopts a new rendering algorithm to enhance the GUI performance, first update part of the screen through an optimized sequence, and then complete additional frame updates, thereby avoiding distracting tearing visual effects. Another new feature is to support non-memory-mapped SPI flash memory, so that more complex GUIs can store graphics resources that take up a lot of memory space, such as images and fonts, in low-cost external storage.

In order to simplify user interface prototyping, TouchGFX Designer also provides application templates optimized for the STM32G071 Nucleo development board and display development kit. If necessary, you can also import an RTOS system into the settings, and then use the TouchGFX Generator tool to replace the hardware.

All software components can now be downloaded and used, including the X-cube-display software package and TouchGFX 4.15.0, as well as code examples running on the G071RB development board. X-NUCLEO-GFX01M1 and STM32G0 products have been mass produced and can be purchased through normal STMicroelectronics agent channels.

In addition, there is a new graphical gadget that can simplify the use of line, column, area, histogram, or combination charts to display sequential data. This small program can run smoothly on any STM32 MCU. Developers can use TouchGFX Designer to customize parameters such as color and layout.