Some of you may have seen these modules on Ebay, Wish and Aliexpress. On the surface they seem a really good way to get a full colour GUI with touch on something fairly low powere. These will work with a low end PIC or Atmega but I’m working with a Arduino Mega and STM32 here.

An example can be found here (as long as the link is live) and i looks like this :

SO on paper this looks like a good bet, it works over I2C, you have a designer application for it, its full colour, a good resolution and in theory all you have to do is update content and process events. Perfect for what I need to do. It even comes with a datasheet, programming cable, examples and software…

Well, thats sort of true, you get the display, a cable for programming (CH340 USB dongle) a cable for connecting it and that is it. There isnt even any demo code loaded so powering it up will get nothing. The vendor didnt reply to requests for help so off to the net I went. and found that this is a common issue. The manufacturer is Hunda Tech and if you pop over to here you can find an almost useless datasheet for it and right at the bottom there is some Arduino examples. There is no sign of the Visual LCD Studio that you need to actually edit the stored displays. You can find this in this archive here, this includes the software, examples, english datasheets and much better documentation. You should be able to get started with this archive.

BUT…

The application is buggy and complete garbage. It really is a prime example of fire and forget software. Save often, do not leave it open (It leaks memory) and expect it to crash with no warning or hope of recovery if you haven’t saved. Many controls do not behave as expected and as for the help… One of the biggest bugbears is auto control numbering, it has a ‘fencepost’ error and will cause compile errors