TinyGPU

TinyGPU is a lightweight Arduino graphics library for RGB565 bitmap surfaces, sprites, and simple 3D wireframe rendering.

RGB565 is a compact 16-bit color format that stores red in 5 bits, green in 6 bits, and blue in 5 bits. It is widely used by small TFT, LCD, OLED, and other embedded display controllers because it needs much less memory and bandwidth than 24-bit RGB while still providing good visual quality for many graphics applications.

Apart form RGB565 we also support RGB666, RGB888 and Monochrome.

TinyGPU is designed as a small in-memory rendering layer that stays independent from any specific display driver. You render into a framebuffer memory first and then forward the resulting pixel data to your own hardware-specific output code.

The library covers three main areas:

• 2D drawing and text rendering for compact embedded displays
• sprite-oriented composition and transforms for UI and simple animation
• lightweight 3D wireframe rendering for visualizations and demos

Features

• RGB565, RGB666, RGB888 and Monochrome color

• In-memory bitmap surfaces

• Basic drawing primitives

  • pixels
  • lines
  • rectangles
  • circles
  • rounded rectangles (outline and fill)
  • arcs (for circular progress/spinner style widgets)

• Bitmap font rendering and wrapped line printing

• Sprite drawing and sprite-aware framebuffer management

  • add
  • move
  • scale
  • rotate

• Basic 3D wireframe rendering

  • transforms
  • camera / view matrix
  • perspective and orthographic projection
  • minimal depth-buffered line rendering

• Graphics Files

  • BMP: saving and loading
  • JPEG: decoding baseline JPEGs via JPEGParser, using the optional TinyJPEG library

• DisplayDriver / TouchDriver: write a rendered Surface out to a display and read touch input from a touch controller

  • DisplayDriverSPI / DisplayDriverQSPI / DisplayDriverDSI: SPI, QSPI and MIPI-DSI panel drivers
  • TouchDriverArduino: XPT2046, FT6236/FT6206, CST816S and GT911 touch controllers
  • DisplayDriverSDL / TouchDriverSDL: render to an SDL2 window and map the desktop mouse to a TouchDriver, so displays and touch-driven UI can be exercised on the desktop without hardware

• LCDBoard: one-call setup (display + touch, and I2S pins where present) for ESP32(-S3/-P4) boards from the arduino-audio-tools Audio Boards wiki

  • ESP32-S3 2.8" Display (FBBA0125-002 / ESP32-S3 Hosyond Display)
  • Guition ESP32-S3 4.3" Capacitive Touch Display (JC4827W543C_I)
  • ESP32 Arduino LVGL WiFi&Bluetooth 2.4" LCD (ESP32-2432S028R / ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display)
  • Guition ESP32-P4 4.3" 480x800 Capacitive Touch Display (JC4880P443C_I_W)
  • WeAct MiniSTM32H7xx (STM32H750VBT6/STM32H743VIT6) with its bundled 0.96" 160x80 ST7735 TFT
  • STM32F723E-Discovery with its on-board 240x240 ST7789H2 LCD and FT6x06/FT3x67 capacitive touch, via the separate, optional stm32f723-disco library

• Integration

  • LVGLDriver: use this library to output data from the lvgl library
  • TouchDriverSDL: use the SDL library for touch support
  • DisplayDriverTFTeSPI / TouchDriverTFTeSPI / LCDBoardTFTeSPI: render and read touch through the optional TFT_eSPI library instead of TinyGPU's own SPI panel/touch drivers, for panels already configured (and touch-calibrated) via TFT_eSPI's User_Setup.h
  • TinyMaterialDesign: a header-only Material Design 3 GUI widget library built on top of TinyGPU's surfaces and touch/gesture stack

• Arduino example sketches

Used By

• TinyMaterialDesign: Material Design 3 GUI widgets rendered with TinyGPU

Documentaion

• Class Documentation
• Wiki
• Examples

Installation

For Arduino, you can download the library as zip and call include Library -> zip library. Or you can git clone this project into the Arduino libraries folder e.g. with

cd  ~/Documents/Arduino/libraries
git clone https://github.com/pschatzmann/TinyGPU.git

For CMake-based projects (desktop, PlatformIO, ...), CMakeLists.txt provides a TinyGPU INTERFACE target, fetched via FetchContent - see examples/*/CMakeLists.txt.

For ESP-IDF, TinyGPU is also usable as a component: clone it as components/TinyGPU (or add its parent directory via EXTRA_COMPONENT_DIRS) and idf_component_register/idf_component.yml take care of the rest. Some headers (Input/TouchDriverArduino.h, Boards/LCDBoardsESP32.h, ...) call into the Arduino API (delay/pinMode/digitalWrite/SPIClass/TwoWire) via TinyGPU/Emulation/EmulationIDF.h - that header uses arduino-esp32 automatically when it's present as a component in the same build (uncomment the dependency in idf_component.yml if you want that), and otherwise falls back to a small ESP-IDF-native emulation of that surface (driver/gpio.h, driver/spi_master.h, driver/i2c.h, esp_timer) - see that header for exactly what is and isn't covered.