Display Wires
In order to connect the TFT Display to the Adafruit Feather, we'll need a handful of wires – 9 wires in total. It's helpful if they're different colors, but you'll most likely have some repeating colors. The length of these wires can be about 11cm long, longer is OK but any shorter and they won't be long enough to reach when mounted to the 3D printed case.
Tin Wires for Display
It's a good idea to tin each wire with a bit of solder – Again, making it less likely for the strands to fray when attaching them to the display breakout board.
Prepped Wires
I found this to be the most time consuming portion of the build. You can speed up the process by using a wire stripper that can strip multiple wires at a time, such as a self-adjusting wire stripper. It doesn't matter which color are connected to the display, but it's a good idea to have some sort of consistency – using blue for ground and red for power is common.
Connect Wires to TFT Display
Now we can connect the wires to the display. I suggest securing the PCB of the display to a Panavise Jr with the back of the PCB facing up. Tin the pinouts on the breakout board by applying a bit of solder to each pin. Follow the circuit diagram for reference – All but the far left and right pins on the breakout are going to need a wire.
Connecting TFT to Feather
Now we can connect the wires from the TFT display to the Adafruit Feather. I found it necessary to secure the TFT display to a pair of third helping hands. The Adafruit Feather is then secured to the Panavise Jr. The wires a bit short so you'll need to keep the two components relatively in close proximity to comfortably solder the wires.
Solder TFT Wires to Feather
You'll want to reference the circuit diagram while soldering the wires from the TFT display to the Adafruit Feather. I suggest downloading the JPG image to your smart phone to reference the connections on while soldering. Some of the connections have similar labeling, such as MOSI, MISO, SCK, ground and 3V.
Page last edited September 25, 2017
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