Nano with Nextion

I posted this on rr but I thought I might post it here on the chance more Nano experimenters might see it. I am wondering if the nano board can be adapted to a Nextion 2.4” touch screen.  I am a ham and have a ubitx arduino based ham transceiver with a Nextion touch screen. Since I understand the nano is arduino based I thought it might be adaptable to the Nextion. I am thinking of building a nano based scanner in a ubitx case with touch screen control. Similar to a Homepatrol.

Blackswan wrote:I am wondering if the nano board can be adapted to a Nextion 2.4” touch screen.

Hi. I have no direct experience with the Nextion displays. I see in the Nextion docs that they use a serial UART. The Micro/Nano/Eagle series use the 4 SPI lines to connect to the Wio Terminal. The current FW of the Nano does not use the serial UART for display/control.

Having said that, the Wio Terminal could be used as an SPI to serial bridge to connect the Nextion display.  The Nextion would connect to the Wio Terminal RX/TX pins. It would take some arduino code writing for the Wio to make that happen. I have connected other serial devices to the Wio RX/TX with no issues.  

With some experimenting and coding it could work.

Hmm. I wonder if a spi to uart interface something like this item on eBay item # 225734663116 would work. It seems like overkill to use both the wio and the Nextion. I would need the pinout for the 16 pin connector

I’m thinking the nano would send audio to a 5w amp and speaker. And be controlled via a Nextion touchscreen. All in a stand alone case. With a usb port on the back for power, and a bnc connector for the antenna.  The whole thing would cost a lot less than a sds scanner

Blackswan wrote:Hmm. I wonder if a spi to uart interface something like this item on eBay item # 225734663116 would work. It seems like overkill to use both the wio and the Nextion.  I would need the pinout for the 16 pin connector

The advantage of using the Wio Terminal as a bridge MCU is all the arduino code is open source for the Wio Terminal. If you were to find an SPI to UART converter that works, the Nextion would still need to have data interface code running on it to talk to the Nano properly.

Depending on one's coding skills, it could be done if a touch screen is your main goal.

I see like the files you load into the Nextion to make it work with the ubitx transceiver.  Still I could mount the wio on the face of the enclosure to provide access to the controls and the rest of the components inside the enclosure. Wouldn’t have touch screen but would still have a self contained scanner

Thanks. I have a lot of ubitx parts wasting away in my parts box. Thought I could put some of them back in use.  I thought a touch screen would be more user friendly than just the three buttons on the WIO. Plus you could add a signal strength meter and other enhancements

Blackswan wrote:Still I could mount the wio on the face of the enclosure to provide access to the controls and the rest of the components inside the enclosure.  Wouldn’t have touch screen but would still have a self contained scanner

Yes, that sounds like it will be a great project.

The Wio Terminal display can be programmed to display a signal strength meter, etc. It is just a matter of writing the arduino code to display anything you wish on the display.

As for a touch screen option, I use Teensy 4.0 mcu and a 3.2" ILI9341 touch screen interfaced to my 1st gen BTT P25RX.  The data interface on the P25RX is different than the Nano. It really comes down to hardware and software coding for a desired project.

Like your project, I am working on putting my Nano inside a Bearcat 210xl case and using the Wio as a display with the Wio RX/TX pins connecting to the keyboard. Still a lot of work for me to do this winter

Sounds intriguing