East Rising 5" LCD with RA8875, Touch, Fonts, Flash and SD-card

The 5" LCD screen from East Rising  is an all-in-one screen module with touch, flash and SD-card. The LCD controller RA8875 provides all the graphic primitives, includes internal fonts and even manages external fonts stored in the flash memory. 

The screen module is available in a wide range a interfaces, including I²C, SPI and parallel, both 8080 and 6800. The SD-card offers two options, SD or SPI. 

The configuration of the screen is done when placing the order but can be change afterwards by removing and adding shunts and resistors.

The reviewed screen uses one SPI connection for the screen and another SPI connection for the microSD-card. However, the whole screen can be controlled through one single SPI port.

A similar screen features the SSD1963 controller instead.

Power Inside

The RA8875 controller from Raio includes a large set of advanced features:
  • Graphic primitives: just provide the coordinates to the controller to draw line, rectangle, circle, ellipse and triangle.
  • Area management: copy-paste an area and apply filters
  • Internal fonts: with extended characters corresponding to the 8859-1, 8859-2, 8859-3 or 8859-4 charsets, perfect for the European languages
  • Optional fonts stored in external flash: among various collections supplied by Genitop.
Those features bring two main advantages: 
  • The screen is incredibly fast, as long as you use those internal commands. However, bit-mapping is much slower on this screen than on other ones, for both reading and writing.
  • The code is very compact, as there's no need to include the graphic primitives or the fonts in the code.
I faced some imitations with this controller on this screen. Displaying a bit-map is relatively slow and some basic features are surprisingly missing. 

For example, the controller doesn't allow caching on the memory —reading an area from the screen and saving it to the flash, for later refreshing of the display—, even if a large optional flash is directly connected to and managed by the controller, alas only on read mode.

The LCD_screen Library Suite adds support for this screen and leverages all the powerful features of the controller.

Pros

  • High quality
  • Built-to-order with many options
  • Flat cable and 0.1" pins
  • Fast controller for area-based display
  • Built-in and optional fonts

Cons

  • Slow controller for pixel-based display
  • RAM can't be used as cache

Wrap-Up

  • High quality design and manufacturing
  • Built-to-order with many options
  • Fast controller for area-based display
  • Great value

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