The Nuvoton N9H30 series with ARM926EJ-S core can operate at up to 300 MHz and can drive up to 1024x768 pixels in RGB parallel port. It integrates a TFT LCD controller and 2D graphics accelerator (GE2D), supporting up to 16.7 million colors (24-bit) LCD screen output with high resolution and color depth for gorgeous display effects. The MCU embeds up to 64 MB DDR II SDRAM, providing ample hardware storage and computing space for excellent design flexibility.
For more information on Nuvoton HMI platforms, visit https://www.nuvoton.com/products/gui-solution/gui-platform/.
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 LVGL Demo
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 earned Standard LVGL board certification, which means users can be confident that it's easy to use with LVGL and can expect decent performance and quality.
Buy Now#
You can purchase the NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 directly from Nuvoton.
Specification#
Performance#
Frame Rate (FPS)#
The MCU's 300 MHz clock speed and 800x480 resolution result in decent performance suitable for most applications.
To evaluate the board, we used a project provided by Nuvoton (see Development section below). With the driver shipped with this project, the board reached 22 FPS on LVGL's certification benchmark.
In the video, you can see that even the most complex transformations and full-screen scrolling with all animations were smooth.
Memory#
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 has 128 MB of external NAND flash. Let's calculate what this capacity enables:
One screen-sized wallpaper at 800×480×32-bit = 1,500 KB. In 128 MB, you can fit 85 uncompressed wallpapers (not counting program size). Alternatively, 128 MB is roughly the size of a one-hour video.
As there is no internal RAM in this MCU, the 64 MB built-in DDR RAM is used for runtime operations. This easily accommodates 2-3 frame buffers. You can also load assets into this memory from slower storage (e.g., SD card or SPI flash).
Storing Assets#
Images and fonts can be stored in four types of memory:
- SPI flash: Slow, non-volatile, medium-sized
- NAND flash: Faster, non-volatile, large
- SD card: Slowest but can have huge capacity
- DDR RAM: Fast, volatile, large
Quality#
Display#
The display is built with TN technology, so its viewing angle and color correctness are only average.
Touchpad#
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 features a resistive touchpad, which recognizes touch with a pen or while wearing gloves. However, customers accustomed to the capacitive touchpads found in smartphones may find the experience different.
Robustness#
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 is a development board designed for evaluation rather than integration into end-products. Although mounting holes are provided, the board is quite robust for prototyping.
For real-world applications, a secondary board may be required for sensors or other peripherals.
The schematic of the board is publicly available and serves as an excellent starting point for developing a custom board based on the N9H30F61IEC MCU.
Development#
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 is supported by RT-Thread.
At its core, RT-Thread is an RTOS, but it's much more than that—it's a complete ecosystem with:
- RT-Thread Studio: A custom IDE with many useful features
- Env: A command-line tool to convert projects to different build systems
- Software Package Manager: LVGL is available as a package
- Many supported boards
Nuvoton provided a ready-to-use RT-Thread project for testing. You can find it here: https://github.com/OpenNuvoton/LVGL_NUMAKER-HMI-N9H30. The project fully utilizes the N9H30F61IEC MCU's GE2D GPU.
Since RT-Thread Studio is not available for Linux and we tested on Linux, we used the Linux version of Env to convert the project. This video was helpful for quickly learning how to use Env.
We successfully converted the project to both Makefile and CMake build systems, and both worked well.
Finally, we used NuWriter Linux to flash the board. Uploading the bin file to DDR RAM took less than 1 second, and flashing to persistent storage took only a few seconds.
Conclusion#
NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 is a versatile and powerful board with state-of-the-art peripherals.
The fact that NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 is supported by RT-Thread makes development easy and fast.
We highly recommend NuMaker-HMI-N9H30 for embedded UI projects!
