Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (2.8" diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240x320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. (We also have a capacitive-touch version of this shield here).

This shield uses the SPI port for sending data to the ILI9341 chipset display, and I2C for reading the TSC2007 resistive touch screen driver. That makes it work great with just about any board that is 'Arduino or Mega shaped' as long as they have the I2C SDA and SCL pins after pin D13, and the SPI 2x3 port. If you want to access the remaining pins, we recommend a WingShield.

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library - you'll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with Adafruit Metro and classic Arduino (UNO, Duemilanove, Diecimila). Solder three jumpers and you can use it at full speed on an Arduino Leonardo or Mega as well.

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. This shield needs only a few pins: five SPI pins for the display (SPI + DC and CS), I2C and IRQ pin for the touch screen, and an optional backlight pin. One more pin can be used for the micro SD card if you want to read images off of it.

We recently did a big update to the two designs to add:

  • Resistive touch screen TSC2007 Touch screen driver chip instead of STMPE811 (which was discontinued)
  • Selectable VddIO for use with 3.3V or 5V chips - by default we use IOref but if your board does not have the IOref pin, you can solder the jumper closed for whatever voltage you like
  • STEMMA QT port for quick connecting sensors and other I2C devices
  • Right Angle Reset button is easier to press now

The shields are fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our libraries - you'll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino or Mega -shaped board.

This guide was first published on Jan 03, 2014. It was last updated on Mar 19, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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