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CED will be closed for Thanksgiving on Thursday, Nov. 28th. We will resume shipping on Friday the 29th. Have a great holiday!
CED will be closed for Thanksgiving on Thursday, Nov. 28th. We will resume shipping on Friday the 29th. Have a great holiday!

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project. Since 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 1.8" display has 128x160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost "Nokia 6110" and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!). And the LCD will always come with the same driver chip so there's no worries that your code will not work from one to the other.

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, Adafruit wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" - they have 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!

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EagleCAD, Arduino library code, Fritzing and datasheets available in the product tutorial

Specifications:

  • 1.8" diagonal LCD TFT display
  • 128x160 resolution, 18-bit (262,144) color
  • 4 or 5 wire SPI digital interface
  • Built-in microSD slot - uses 2 more digital lines
  • 5V compatible! Use with 3.3V or 5V logic
  • Onboard 3.3V @ 150mA LDO regulator
  • 2 white LED backlight, transistor connected so you can PWM dim the backlight
  • 1x10 header for easy breadboarding
  • 4 x 0.9"/2mm mounting holes in corners
  • Overall dimensions: 1.35" x 2.2" x 0.25" (34mm x 56mm x 6.5mm)
  • Current draw is based on LED backlight usage: with full backlight draw is ~50mA

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