Designing with STM32G0 and TouchGFX will allow developers to target a bill of materials as low as $5 to add a small graphical display to any project. Simple devices such as timers, controllers, and home appliances will now be able to offer a smartphone-like user experience.
The X-Nucleo-GFX01M1 shield is supported by a new X-cube-display package and contains a 2.2-inch QVGA (320x240) SPI display, 64-Mbit SPI NOR Flash, and a joystick and is ready to use with various STM32 MCU development boards such as the NUCLEO-G071RB. The STM32G071RB is a mainstream Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU that integrates up to 128kBytes Flash, 36kBytes SRAM, extensive communication interfaces, analogue peripherals, fast I/Os, hardware security ID, and a USB Type-C Power Delivery controller.
The TouchGFX software builds on the TouchGFX Engine’s partial framebuffer, which can reduce the GUI RAM footprint by up to 90% and allow a simple user interface in as little as 16-20KB of internal MCU RAM. A new rendering algorithm enhances GUI performance by realising partial screen updates in an optimised order to allow extra updates and avoid visually distracting tearing effects.
Also new, support for non-memory-mapped SPI Flash allows more complex GUIs to use low-cost off-chip storage for memory-hungry graphics assets such as images and fonts.
To ease user-interface prototyping, an optimised application template for the STM32G071 Nucleo board and display kit is available in TouchGFX Designer. It is also possible to introduce an RTOS to the setup if required and use TouchGFX Generator to change to other hardware.
All elements are available now, including the X-cube-display package and TouchGFX 4.15.0 with code examples for running the G071RB. The X-NUCLEO- GFX01M1 and STM32G0 products are in mass production and available through the normal ST distribution channels.
In addition, a new graph widget simplifies showing sequential data using lines, bars, area plots, histograms, or combined visualizations. The widget works smoothly with any STM32 MCU and developers can customise aspects such as colours and layout using TouchGFX Designer.
Also new in TouchGFX 4.15.0, is full out-of-the-box support for the STM32H725 that lets developers run microprocessor-class graphics on ST’s Cortex-M7 MCUs.
