Displaying my inadequacies (TFT)

[PerranOak]

For my self-training in PICs and serial comms, I have been advised to get a display.

Could anyone recommend a simple/useful/cheap display please? I was thinking of a 320x240 TFT touch so it would have a future after my learning.

Noob question: how do they communicate with the PIC - all the same way?

I don't really want some Arduino-type "ready solution" where it's all done for you or I'll learn nothing. Then again, I am at the beginning so simple is best!

Cheers.

[Ian.M]

There's more different display controller chipsets, protocols and hardware interfaces than you can shake a stick at.  Rolling your own driver for an 8 bit PIC from the controller datasheet will be an exercise in heavy frustration.  Going bitmapped to start with is also crazy - simply outputting a single changeable character to the display (positioned top left) will require dozens of lines of code, not including defining a font table. 

There's a dammed good reason why most of Microchip's low end development boards with displays came with  HD44780 compatible character LCDs.   However a HD44780 display does require a lot of I/O pins: 11 for the easier to use full eight bit mode,  7 for four bit mode or 6 for write only four bit mode. so if short of pins, its quite common to sacrifice performance and hang it off an 8 bit I2C I/O expander, e.g PCF8574.   Even writing a driver for a 'vanilla' parallel interface HD44780 display can be challenging enough for the less experienced PIC programmer . . .