Adafruit 1.54″ 240×240 Wide Angle TFT LCD Display With MicroSD – ST7789 With EYESPI Connector

We’ve been looking for a display like this for a long time – it’s only 1.5″ diagonal but has a high density 220 PPI, 240×240 pixel display with full-angle viewing. It looks a lot like our 1.44″ 128×128 display, but has 4x as many pixels and looks great at any angle. We’ve seen displays of this calibre used in smartwatches and small electronic devices but they’ve always been MIPI interfaces. Finally, we found one that is SPI and has a friendly display driver, so it works with any and all microcontrollers or microcomputers!

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colourful and very 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 1.54″ display has 240×240 16-bit full colour pixels and is an IPS display, so the colour looks great up to 80 degrees off the axis in any direction. The TFT driver (ST7789) is very similar to the popular ST7735, and our Arduino library supports it well.

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as an ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator, auto-reset circuitry, and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. We also had a little extra space, so we placed a microSD card holder so you can easily load full colour 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

Arduino library

that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and bitmaps as well as example code. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favourite microcontroller! Wiring is easy, we strongly encourage using the hardware SPI pins of your Arduino as software SPI is noticeably slower when dealing with this size display. For Raspberry Pi or other Single Board Computer Python users, we have a

user-space Pillow-compatible library

. For CircuitPython there’s a

displayio driver

for native support.

This display breakout also features a

18-pin “EYESPI” standard FPC connector

with flip-top connector. You can use a

18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable

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

Please note! This display is designed originally for smartwatches and similar, where there’s a glass over the screen. Without something gently holding the screen down, the backlight can eventually peel away from the TFT. (It’s not destructive but it’s unattractive) You can prevent this by, ideally, adding a plastic or glass cover/overlay. If using bare, try dabbing a touch of E6000 or similar craft glue on the thin side edges, or using a thin piece of tape to keep the front TFT attached to the backlight.

Specifications

• 1.54″ LCD TFT display
• Built-in microSD slot
• 1×16 header for easy breadboarding
• 4 x 0.1″ / 2.5mm mounting holes in corners
• LCD screen dimensions: 32mm x 31mm / 1.3″ x 1.2″
• Overall dimension: 43.7mm x 41.8mm x 5.5mm / 1.7″ x 1.6″ x 0.2″
• Mounting holes: 1.5″ x 1.4″
• Weight (assembled): 9.8g

Revision History:

• July 2019 we changed the TFT that used to be one that is more durable and also exposed the TE pin. The shape has also changed to accommodate the different TFT module, and the pinout has shifted to add the TE pin. Code usage is identical.
• November 2022 – we’ve updated this TFT breakout with a

  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.

Resources

• TFT Datasheet

• GitHub