It's the size of your thumbnail, with glorious 160x80 pixel color... it's the Adafruit Mini TFT Breakout! This very very small display is only 0.96" diagonal, packed with RGB pixels, for making very small high-density displays.

The display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available!

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. We also had a little space so we placed a microSD card holder so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card. The microSD card is not included, but you can pick one up here.

Of course, we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - we've written a full open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text and bitmaps as well as example code and a wiring tutorial. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

Specifications:

  • 0.96" diagonal LCD TFT display
  • 160x80 resolution, 16-bit color
  • 4 wire SPI digital interface - SCK, MOSI, CS and DC pins.
  • Built-in microSD slot - uses 2 more digital lines
  • 5V compatible! Use with 3.3V or 5V logic
  • Onboard 3.3V @ 150mA LDO regulator
  • 1 white LED backlight, transistor connected so you can PWM dim the backlight
  • 0.1" pitch header for easy breadboarding
  • 2 removable mounting holes in corners
  • Current draw is based on LED backlight usage: with full backlight draw is ~25mA

This guide was first published on Jun 21, 2017. It was last updated on Mar 13, 2024.

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

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