1.8″ Color TFT LCD Display With MicroSD Card Breakout (ST7735R)

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 128×160 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

.

This display breakout also features an

18-pin “EYESPI” standard FPC connector

with flip-top connector. You can use an

18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable

to connect to all the GPIO pins for when you want to skip the soldering.

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!

Features

• 1.8″ diagonal LCD TFT display
• 128×160 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
• 1×10 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

Resources

• Product Wiki

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

Revision History:

• As of December 30, 2022 – we’ve updated this TFT breakout with an EYESPI connector to make cabling easier with an 18-pin FPC. We also used Adafruit Pinguin to make a lovely silkscreen. The board is otherwise the same size, pinout, and functionality.