Arduino Library for HX8347-I Router Front Panel LCD

A while ago I managed to wire the front panel of a Sercomm router to a STM32 blue pill development board and I have attempted to control the color 2.8" LCD and the capacitive keypad found on the front panel of this type of router. Long story short: if you own a discarded Sercomm SHG1500 router that reports LCDv6 "gateway hardware version", this is the front panel you can control. OpenWrt can't be currently installed on these routers and there is no known way of changing their firmware or having access to bootloader.

But the front panel can be a great module if you're into electronics. It has a 2.8 inch LCD and a 5 keys capacitive keypad next to it. Hardware version LCDv6 uses a HX8347-I based LCD with SPI write only interface. The keypad uses I²C bus and an additional pin to trigger an interrupt when a key is touched. More on that in another post. Interfacing the front panel to common 2.54 mm pinheaders is not straightforward since it uses a 2x15 pinheader with 1.27 mm pitch. But I built an adapter you can find in the other post.

Truly HX8347-I LCD showing the SMPTE pattern

Router's LCD and keypad interfaced to Arduino

A router with display is not something you see everyday. That’s why when I saw two such routers that were discarded I bought them. At that time I had absolutely no idea if I could install an open source firmware on them (such as OpenWrt). I didn’t even know what type of display do they use. Currently, there is no way of installing a 3rd party firmware on those devices. But the front panel of the router can be interfaced to a microcontroller (only a specific hardware version).

The devices I’m talking about are SerComm SHG1500 routers, used for ADSL internet. They are based on Broadcom BCM6361 SoC and, although this platform is supported by OpenWrt, a specific build for this device or a way to upgrade firmware isn’t known. So I gave up this idea. But upon opening the case, the front panel with LCD display looked like a module that could be used for my projects. The LCD is color TFT, 2.8” size. Next to it there is a capacitive keypad with 5 keys. Front panel plugs into main board using a 2x15 pins, 1.27 mm pitch connector. It seemed good enough to start gathering information.

SerComm SHG1500 front panel with LCD and capacitive keypad