Demo Video

Introduction

A dedicated IoT terminal can be really useful sometimes for displaying your IoT sensor data and controlling your IoT project. A smart phone can also do that, but you can use your phone as terminal all day right? so this little can help to free your phone from the it and you can even program it to work with various IoT communication protocols that are not available on your phone, such as zigbee, RF signal, LoRa and etc.

The interesting part of this project is that it uses a seperate HMI USART touchscreen display that has its own CPU, memory and flash, which means your IoT main controller doesn't have to spend a big fraction of its valuable memory and CPU resources for displaying image and scanning for the touch inputs, it can focus on sending and receiving IoT data and other more important computation such as running machine learning models and doing tricky math computations.

Project Details

This project has 2 important components,

1. Ameba AMB23 2.4G + 5GHz WiFi and BLE microcontroller
2. HMI USART Touch TFT LCD Display from TJC

The AMB23 serves as the main IoT controller , network gateway and main computational block, you can use it as a normal arduino board to control peripherals or sending and receiving any kinds of IoT data. Whereas the HMI USART display handle all the GUI related tasks such as user input, display image, footage, animation and even audio playing,

The company that make this HMI display seperate the hardware and software into 2 different versions, one for Chinese and the other for English speaking users, and they all come with a free editing software for editing the graphical user interface (GUI) as well as control and display logic, it's very easy to use and comes with many useful example and resources to help you save time in your development. More details can be found down below,

The Chinese version,

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000828024389.html

The English version,

https://nextion.tech/

Once your GUI part is done, you can easily use their Arduino library to program your main IoT controller, remmember that it only uses UART to communicate with your main controller thus drastically reducing the memory and CPU demands from the main controller.

Conclusion

This project only demonstrated the potentials of what can be done on this combination, more could be added later such as a WiFI manager, BT scanner, RC car controller and MQTT data monitor and so on and so forth.