When working on Arduino projects that involve TFT displays, I often found myself stuck in a slow and frustrating loop: write some code, upload it to the board, wait for the flash process, look at the screen, spot a small UI issue, then repeat everything again.
I started looking for a desktop tool that would allow me to simulate a TFT screen, just to quickly test layouts, colours, text positioning, and basic drawing logic before deploying to real hardware. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find anything that really fit this use case.
So I decided to build my own solution.
The idea behind this TFT simulator is simple: provide a lightweight desktop simulator that mimics the behavior of a TFT display, allowing developers to test and debug their display logic without constantly flashing a microcontroller. This makes the development faster, safer and much more enjoyable - especially during the early stages of a project.
The simulator focuses on what matters most during prototyping: seeing how your interface looks and behaves, catching visual bugs early, and iterating quickly. Once everything looks right, you can move to real hardware with much more confidence.
This project was born out of a real need, and it’s meant to help other makers, students, and developers who face the same problem. If it saves even a few upload cycles, it has already done its job.
For more informations about the project you can just go on the Github repo and give a look at the readme: https://github.com/mdmmt05/Arduino_TFT_simulator
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