Smart TFT Displays for your Projects

Adding TFT display in your embedded product could be a very time consuming task.

I am consulting since last > 2.5 years now and not even a single project came to where the customer told, don’t worry about timelines we have more time than what you are asking. Everyone wants to build products on yesterday basis 🙂

Smart TFT Displays for your Projects 1

Coming back to topic, it’s not just the initial development time with TFT and touch which hurts but also:

  • You need to maintain the project which will need bug fixes
  • Keeping adding features
  • Engineers in your team will leave for other opportunities and new engineer need to learn what was done quickly and build on top of that

This is a big struggle. People are have worked on or managed embedded product development with TFT display, understands this very well.

Some of the manufacturers, understood this gap and built the Smart TFT display platform which are very easy to use.

They all provide some kind of PC software with the help of which you can built GUI quickly and with in a few days you will be up and running with your TFT Display along with touch.

Limitations of Smart TFT Displays

But, there is a catch, you cannot do everything with the help of these displays, you need to carefully check your requirements and see if your requirements are feasible with these available smart tft display or not, if not, you might need to build your products with TFT Display from scratch.

There are some frameworks available like LVGL, etc. but still Smart displays are way easier to use.

Many a times you will chose not to use these smart displays if your volumes are high, as these smart displays are costlier than just TFT display. They charge extra for the MCU board they provide with TFT which makes it smart. So for higher volume/very cost sensitive requirements you won’t be able to use Smart displays.

Smart TFT Display Manufacturers

There are many companies who are building these smart displays.

They have Resistive, Capacitive touch panel support as well.

Many also provide other peripheral which can even eliminate the need of external MCU for certain projects.

Sr. No.Smart TFT Display ManufacturerCountry of Origin
1.MikroESerbia
2.Winstart Smart DisplayTaiwan
3.Nextion China
4.DWINChina
5.Stone TechnologyChina

If you are aware of some other Smart TFT Display Manufacturers please do let me know and I will add them here for easy access.


I hope you found this blog useful.

If you have any feedback, you can share it in the comments section or you can also contact me directly.

Read more interesting articles on Embedded Systems Design.

If you need help on custom embedded product development, do reach out to me.


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