Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a color touchscreen LCD. These TFT displays are big (2.8" or 3.2" diagonal) bright (4 or 6 white-LED backlight) and colorful! 240x320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display.

As a bonus, this display has either a resistive or capacitive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.

This display has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. The display can be used in two modes: 8-bit or SPI. For 8-bit mode, you'll need 8 digital data lines and 4 or 5 digital control lines to read and write to the display (12 lines total). SPI mode requires only 5 pins total (SPI data in, data out, clock, select, and d/c) but is slower than 8-bit mode.

If you have the resistive touch version, 4 pins are required for the touch screen (2 digital, 2 analog) or you can purchase and use our resistive touchscreen controller (not included) to use I2C or SPI

If you have the capacitive touch version, there is a capacitive touch controller chip already installed that communicates of standard I2C plus an IRQ line.

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The 2.8" version now comes with an EYESPI connector! This 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC connector has a flip-top connector for using a flex cable to hook up your display. It enables you to avoid soldering and get your display up off of the breadboard! Consider it a sort of "STEMMA QT for displays" - a way to quickly connect and extend display wiring that uses a lot of SPI pins. It also allows for communicating with displays over longer distances. The EYESPI flex cables are available in multiple lengths to suit any project. This is especially useful for projects where you want your display mounted separate from your microcontroller.

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Of course, we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!". For 8-bit interface fans we've written a full open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and more. For SPI users, we have a library as well, its separate from the 8-bit library since both versions are heavily optimized.

For resitive touch, we also have a touch screen library that detects x, y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it.

For capacitive touch, we have an I2C interface library for the captouch chip.

If you are using an Arduino-shaped microcontroller, check out our TFT shield version of this same display, with SPI control and a touch screen controller as well

This guide was first published on Mar 18, 2014. It was last updated on Mar 14, 2024.

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

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