Add some sizzle to your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection and a capacitive touchscreen.
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 capacitive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.
This shield is the capacitive version as opposed to the resistive touchscreen we also sell. This touchscreen doesn't require pressing down on the screen with a stylus, and has a nice glossy glass cover. It is a single-touch display.
This shield uses SPI for the display and SD card and is easier to use with UNO, Mega & Leonardo Arduino's. The capacitive touchscreen controller uses I2C but you can share the I2C bus with other I2C devices.
The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up the library - you'll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (UNO/Duemilanove/Diecimila). Solder three jumpers and you can use it at full speed on a 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 fewer pins than the v1 shield, so you can connect more sensors, buttons and LEDs: 5 SPI pins for the display, 2 shared I2C pins for the touchscreen controller and another pin for uSD card if you want to read images off of it.
Of course, we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - Adafruit have written a full open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. They also have a touch screen library that detects x & y location and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Revision History:
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As of February 24, 2023 –Adafruit have updated this TFT breakout with a QT port! They also used Adafruit Pinguin to make a lovely silkscreen. The board is otherwise the same size, pinout, and functionality.
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As of Oct 26, 2018 - this board has the I2C pullups connected to IOREF rather than 5V so it's more compatible with 3.3V boards.
Specifications:
- 240x320 resolution, 18-bit (262,000) color - the library uses 16 bit color mode
- High speed SPI display with digital I2C touchscreen driver
- The display uses digital pins 13-9. Touchscreen controller requires I2C pins SDA and SCL. microSD pin requires digital #4. That means you can use digital pins 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and analog 0-5. Pin 4 is available if not using the microSD
- Works with any classic Arduino '328. Solder closed three jumpers to use the ICSP header for use with Leonardo or Mega
- Onboard 3.3V @ 300mA LDO regulator, current draw depends on usage but is about 100mA for the display and touchscreen
- 4 white LED backlight. On by default but you can connect the transistor to a digital pin for backlight control
- Single-touch capacitive touch bonded on top
Datasheets and PCB CAD files available in the tutorial