Using A Smartphone As A Touchscreen For Arduino

If you want a good display and interface device for an embedded project, it’s hard to look past an old smartphone. After all, you’ve got an excellent quality screen and capacitive touch interface all in the same package! [Doctor Volt] explains how to easily set up your old smartphone to work as a touchscreen for your Arduino.

[Doctor Volt] demonstrates the idea with a 2018 Samsung Galaxy A8, though a wide variety of Android phones can be put to use in this way. The phone is connected to the Arduino via a USB-to-serial converter and an OTG cable. Using a USB-C phone with Power Delivery is ideal here, as it allows the phone to be powered while also communicating with the Arduino over USB.

The RemoteXY app is built specifically for this purpose. It can be installed on an Android phone to allow it to communicate effectively with Arduino devices, which run the RemoteXY library in turn. Configuring the app is relatively straightforward, with a point-and-click wizard helping you designate what hardware you’re using and how you’ve got it hooked up. [Doctor Volt] does a great job of explaining how to hook everything up, and how to build some simple graphical interfaces.

There are a ton of display and interface options in the embedded space these days, many of which can be had cheaply off the shelf. Still, few compete with the resolution and quality of even older smartphones. It’s a neat project that could come in very handy for your next embedded build! Video after the break.

22 thoughts on “Using A Smartphone As A Touchscreen For Arduino

  1. Man it would be cool if the UI layout was pushed by the microcontroller. Then you just plug in and open the app and you’re off to the races. There’s a standard OTA mechanism and the controls are implemented in the app. But config and logic is on the Arduino.

  2. Hi there.
    RemoteXY is a nice and useful library. For me I miss there a solution how show older data. Because I used it by bluetooth. I wanted to see data for 3day in chart when I connected. And it is not possible.

  3. Where is the editorial oversight here? This is hardly in the spirit of a “hack” if you have to pay for it … and it’s a subscription model no less! Not to mention that the price is subvertly hidden until you actually install the app.

  4. I’m still looking for a nice desktop app to visualize serial data output without resorting to specialized libraries, with a parser that can pick out the relevant data and display it in a customizable widget. There are some, but they only work so-so with very limited display functionality.

  5. Smartphones are typically the way to go. I once built a wirelessly controlled guitar pedal using an ESP32 and some digital potentiometers. I used MIT’s App Inventor to create an app that would enable me to connect the ESP’s Bluetooth to an Android. The only two downsides was that App Inventor only works with Androids, and the digipots (X9C series) were a bit glitchy for my taste. But even without App Inventor, a Bluetooth serial app and text commands would work just fine for that

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