tft display with esp32 supplier

Alibaba.com offers 847 esp32 with display products. About 22% % of these are integrated circuits （old）, 14%% are lcd modules, and 7%% are other electronic components.

A beautiful 3.5” touchscreen display, based on ESP32-WROVER, with a built-in 2M pixel OV2640 camera, makes it an ever perfect platform for your ESP32 projects.

Makerfabs ESP32 3.5” Touch with camera is absolutely open for makers, and besides, Makerfabs provide plenty of Demos to help the users on the usage. Have a try at this fantastic display in your next ESP32 project!~

The Makerfabs 3.5 inch TFT Touch is great but the refresh rate is always a problem, some customers feedback they want a higher speed display. The ESP32-S2 Parallel TFT has a much higher refresh rate, but the disadvantage is the lack of Bluetooth...

That is why this latest ESP32-S3 Parallel TFT, compares to the S2 version, not only more SRAM and ROM, the Bluetooth 5.0 make it fit for applications such as local monitoring/controlling.

This 3.5" 320x480 TFT LCD driver is ILI9488, it uses 16bits parallel line for communication with ESP32-S3, the main clock could be up to 20MHz, making the display smooth enough for video displays. With this display, you can freely to create more IoT display projects, check the demo project in the video:

Same as the S2 version, there 2 onboard Mabee pins(A I2c and an IOs) with the breakout connectors, to connect the ESP32-S2 display with sensors/ actuators, suitable for IoT applications.

The TFT display is a kind of LCD that is connected to each pixel using a transistor and it features low current consumption, high-quality, high-resolution and backlight. This 2.8-inch full color LCD has a narrow PCB display. The resolution is 320×280 pixels and it has a four-wire SPI interface and white backlight.

//#define ILI9488_DRIVER // WARNING: Do not connect ILI9488 display SDO to MISO if other devices share the SPI bus (TFT SDO does NOT tristate when CS is high)

The content is intended to be updated from time to time, I will add more details if I found new display or library update. You can also help me enrich the content by leaving comments below.

You can run various IoT projects prefectly without any display. But not all IoT project only feed data in single direction (IoT to server), some IoT also gather real time information from the server for displaying.

My previous instructables, ESP32 Photo Clock is am example, it download a current minute photo from the Internet, decode the JPEG photo and display it.

Many Arduino projects use monochrome display, one of the reason is the limited resources of a MCU. 320 pixels width, 240 pixels height and 8 bits color for each RGB color channel means 230 KB for each full screen picture. But normal Arduino (ATmega328) only have 32 KB flash and it is time consuming (over a second) to read data from SD card and draw it to the color display.

ESP32 have changed the game! It have much faster processing power (16 MHz vs 240 MHz dual core), much more RAM (2 KB vs over 200 KB) and much more flash (32 KB vs 4 MB), so it is capable to utilize more color and higher resolution image for displaying. At the same time it is capable to do some RAM hungry process such as Animated GIF, JPEG or PNG file decoding, it is a very important feature for displaying information gathered from the internet.

Color display have many type of interfaces: Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), 6-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 18-bit and 24-bit parallel interfaces and also NeoPixel!

SPI dominate the hobby electronics market, most likely because of fewer wire required to connect. Most display in my drawer only have SPI pins breaking out, so this instructables focus on SPI display and a few 8-bit display.

NeoPixel matrix is a very special type of color display. If you are interested in NeoPixel matrix display, here are some of my instructables using it:

There are various color display for hobby electronics: LCD, IPS LCD, OLED with different resolutions and different driver chips. LCD can have higher image density but OLED have better viewable angle, IPS LCD can have both. OLED have more power efficient for each light up pixel but may have burn-in problems. Color OLED operate in 14 V, it means you need a dedicate step-up circuit, but it is not a problem if you simply use with a break-out board. LCD in most case can direct operate in 3.3 V, the same operating voltage as ESP32, so you can consider not use break out board to make a slimmer product.

Software support on the other side also influence your selection. You can develop ESP32 program with Arduino IDE or direct use ESP-IDF. But since ESP-IDF did not have too much display library and not much display hardware supported, so I will concentrate on Arduino display libraries only.

For the beginner, I think buying adafruit, or similar supportive vendor, hardware and using its Arduino library can have good seamless experience (though I have no budget to try it all). TFT_eSPI library have better performance but configuration require make changes in the library folder. Ucglib and UTFT-ESP run a little bit slow but it support many hardware and it is a popular library, you can find many Arduino projects using it. LovyanGFX library start appear at 2019, it support many dev device such as M5Stack, M5StickC, TTGO T-Watch, ODROID-GO, ESP-WROVER-KIT, WioTerminal and more. I am also writing a new library called Arduino_GFX since 2019.

OLED have a big advantage, the pixel only draw power if it lights up. On the other hand, LCD back light always draw full power even you are displaying a black screen. So OLED can help save some power for the project powered by a battery.

Thanks for the popularity of wearable gadget, I can find more small size IPS LCD in the market this year(2018). The above picture is an 0.96" 80x160 IPS color LCD using ST7735 driver chip. As you can see in the 3rd picture, you can treat it as a 128x160 color display in code but only the middle part is actually displaying. The 4th picture is the display without breakout board, it is thin, tiny and very fit for a wearable project!

SSD1283A is 1.6" 130x130 display, it claim only consume 0.1 in sleep mode and backlight turned off. In sleep mode the last drawn screen still readable under sufficient lighting.

ST7789 also a common driver chip in ESP32 community. One of the reason is ESP32 official development kit using it. As same as ILI9341, ST7789 also can drive 240x320 resolution.

This also the highest pixel density color display in my drawer. As same as normal LCD, it can direct operate in 3.3 V, so it is very good for making slim wearable device.

There are many display libraries that can support various hardware. I have picked 4 of most popular Arduino library for comparison:Adafruit GFX Family

The display speed is one of the most important thing we consider to select which library. I have chosen TFT_eSPI PDQ test for this comparison. I have made some effort to rewrite the PDQ test that can run in 4 libraries. All test will run with the same 2.8" ILI9341 LCD.

As I found TFT_eSPI is the most potential display library for ESP32 in this instructables, I have paid some effort to add support for all my display in hand. The newly added display support marked letter M in red at the above picture, here is my enhanced version:

Adafruit sell various display module in hobby electronics market and they also have very good support in software level. Their display libraries all built on a parent class called Adafruit_GFX, so I call it Adafruit GFX Family. This library generally support most Arduino hardware (also ESP32).

In Arduino Library Manager simply search "adafruit display", you can see all the family members. If you want to install it, say ILI9341, simply select "Adafruit ILI9341" and then click install. Remember also install its dependent library "Adafruit GFX Library".

This library method signature is very similar to Adafruit GFX, but it is tailor-made for ESP8266 or ESP32. I think the source code is optimised for ESP32, so the PDQ result is much faster than other libraries.

Note: The most difficult part using this library is you are required to configure this library before you can use it. The configuration file is located at the library folder, it should be "Arduino/libraries/TFT_eSPI/User_setup.h" under you own documents folder. It have many comments help you to do that, please follow the comments step by step to finish the configuration. Here is my User_setup.h for ILI9341:

ESP32 + ILI9341 can run at SPI speed 40 MHz, it require some code change at library folder. The above pictures are the fine tuned result. Here are the code change summary:

ST7735 and ILI9341 are the most popular display, this 2 are better option for the beginner. You may notice LCD have a big weakness, the viewable angle, some color lost outside the viewable angle and the screen become unreadable. If you have enough budget, OLED or IPS LCD have much better viewable angle.

In most case, we study how to use a code library by searching sample on the web. I have tried search four libraries keyword in Github, Adafruit is most popular and UTFT the second.

ILI9341 should be most valuable display for the beginner. Adafruit GFX Library should be most easy to use for the beginner, and since TFT_eSPI have very similar method signature, it is very easy to switch to a faster library later on.

OLED require 14 V to light up the pixel so it is not easy to decouple the breakout board. On the other hand, LCD (also IPS LCD) usually operate in 3.3 V, as same as the ESP32. In most case, there are only the LED control circuit required between LCD and ESP32, i.e. a transistor and few resistors. So it relatively easy to make it.

My special hint: I like to soldering a FPC cable with the same pin pitch size as the LCD to help the connection with the MCU. I have used this technique in these instructables:

If you read through the data sheet of the color display, you may find most of color display can support 18 bit color depth (6 bit for each RGB channel). 18 bit color depth can have a better image quality that 16 bit color depth (5 bit in red and blue channel, 6 bit for green channel). However, only Ucglib actually run at 18 bit color depth (262,144 colors), other 3 libraries all run at 16 bit color depth (65,536 colors). It is because 18 bit color depth actually require transfer 3 bytes (24 bit) of data for each pixel, it means 50% more data require to transfer and store in memory. It is one of the reason why Ucglib run slower, but it can have a better image quality.

Thank you very much for posting this detailed review of the color display option available for "Duino users. You have saved me hours, maybe days of time wandering the web looking for information.0

Great article! Very interested in round displays. There are available round displays based on st7687s (128 * 128) and st7789 (240 * 240), but I have not found any information on practical use.

Hello! Yes, I purchased this display from keyestudio, connected it to esp32 using this library from dfrobot. It is only necessary to consider that the pinout of the display connectors differs from dfrobot and keyestudio.

I"m wanting to connect a VGA camera, the sort you find as a little module on eBay with OVPxxxx chip, to a screen such as ILxxxx family, which appears to have direct VGA input. I think it will work if I connect the camera directly with no MCU, but I"d also like to add a cross-hair to the display (for a drill targetting system). I wonder is it possible to intercept the serial video data and change individual pixels in a streaming fashion, instead of loading a whole screen into memory, changing it and passing it on? I ask because it seems to me it would need a much less powerful MCU.0

Thank you so much for such a great article. I have been trying to choose the best library to use for a project that will use either a SSD1351 or a ST7735 both being 128x128. The key to my project is to be able to dump a frame buffer in to the display and then recalculate the next frame buffer. :)

So, basically I make a reset in the beggining (read datasheet) then next I use only SPI_DAT and SPLI_CLK. If I destroy the sequence touching with an oscilloscope, the LCD stops to understand the sequence DAT/CLK and I have to make another reset.

Those 2 pins must be dedicated to the display, otherwise the display will get confused without the CS pin. One DAT/CLK to LCD and another DAT/CLK to I2C.

Hello! Thank"s for your instruction. I want to use your 8pin ili9486 320x480 spi display with one of your presented libraries and esp32. 1.) Could you please tell me the connections between the display and the esp32 and 2.) which numbers do I have to write into the line utft myglcd (ili9486,?,?,?,?)?

TFT_display_init() Perform display initialization sequence. Sets orientation to landscape; clears the screen. SPI interface must already be setup, tft_disp_type, _width, _height variables must be set.

compile_font_file Function which compiles font c source file to binary font file which can be used in TFT_setFont() function to select external font. Created file has the same name as source file and extension .fnt

This board works fine with TFT_eSPI when the ST7789 driver is selected. The pin settings are different and the RGB colour order is reversed compared to other boards so I have added an option to the TFT_eSPI library to set the colour order.

I have set the SPI rate to 80MHz and the ST7789 TFT seems to work perfectly at that clock speed, the higher clock frequency boosts the drawing speed (e.g. clear screen in 18ms as opposed to 33.3ms).

The Grove I2C connector is not soldered in, this is clearly because the pins would poke through the board and damage the back of the display. It would be possible to "surface mount" the connector by bending the pins but I think the solder flowing into the PTH may melt the reflective backlight diffuser screen at the back of the display. One way around this would be to fill the holes with epoxy first.

Makerfabs has launched a 3.5-inch TFT touchscreen display with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity through an ESP32-S3 dual-core Tensilica LX7 microcontroller clocked at 240 MHz with vector instructions for AI acceleration.

This display offers a 320×480 resolution through the ILI9488 LCD driver, uses a 16-bit parallel interface for communication with ESP32-S3 clocked at up to 20 Mhz making it suitable for smooth graphics user interface, and the company also claims it is smooth enough for video displays, but more on that later.

Espressif Systems ESP32-S3 dual-core Tensilica LX7 @ up to 240 MHz with vector instructions for AI acceleration, 512KB RAM, 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE with support for long-range, up to 2Mbps data rate, mesh networking

Display – 3.5-inch color TFT LCD with 480×320 resolution, 16-bit parallel interface (ILI94988 driver), and capacitive touch panel (FT6263); backlight controller

The display can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. Sample code using the LovyanGFX library and EAGLE schematics and PCB layout can be found on Github. Makerfabs also designed an ESP32-S2 model that lacks Bluetooth connectivity, and the ESP32-S3 touchscreen display comes with more RAM and eMMC flash.

I was tipped about this display by Jon, a regular reader and commenter on CNX Software, who bought it, and said it works as advertised. The ESP32-S3 can really drive a high-speed display with a parallel LCD interface. However, it can’t stream video because there is no H.264 decoder, but it is great if you want a responsive GUI.

Makerfabs ESP32-S3 16-bit parallel capacitive touchscreen display is sold for $39.80 plus shipping, and the ESP32-S2 model is the same price with a resistive display, and there’s a capacitive display option for $4 more. As a side note, we previously wrote about another, smaller ESP32-S3 display, namely the LilyGO T-Display-S3, with a 1.9-inch display connected over a slower 8-bit parallel interface, and no touchscreen function that sells for around $17.

In this project, we will make few some interesting projects using ESP32 & 3.5″ TFT Touch Screen Display Camera. The customized board is manufacture by Makerfabs and has a combination of ESP32-WROVER chip + 3.5″ TFT Display + 2 MP OV2640 Camera + SD Card slot. With this cutomized board you can make plenty of ESP32 Based project.

But before you start doing these projects, you can read the previous article, i.e ESP32 Video Game. The ESP32 Video game is built using the same ESP32 TFT Touch Screen Display Camera.

This is a beautiful 3.5” touchscreen display, based on ESP32-WROVER chip, with a built-in 2M pixel OV2640 camera. The combination of all these gives a perfect platform for ESP32 Application like Video Games.

The TFT LCD driver is basically ILI9488 & has a dimension of 3.5″ with 320x480 screen resolution. The ILI9488 LCD uses SPI for communication with the ESP32 chip. The SPI main clock could be up to 60M~80M, make the display smooth enough for videos. The camera module on this board is an OV2640 Camera with a 2MP resolution.

with this camera, you can make applications such as remote photography, face recognition & security system projects. While the camera is not used, you can freely use all these pins with the breakout connectors. You can then connect the ESP32 display with sensors or modules & use it for any IoT applications. The ESP32 chip support Arduino or MicroPython programming

The board is having a micro SD-Card slot for attaching an external SD-Card. The SD Card can be used for storing files and images. There is a type C USB Port, basically a USB to UART converter for ESP32 programming. You can connect a Type-C data cable to the board & directly upload the code to the Board.

There are two versions of ESP32 3.5″ TFT Touch Screen with Camera. One is the Capacitive Type and the other the resistive type. You can use any of the display that you want. The purchase Link for both the display is given below.

You need to add ESP32 Board Package to the Arduino IDE. To do that Select “File>Preferences>settings>Additional Boards Manager URLs” to fill the link: https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json. After that download the ESP32 Package from Board Manager.

LovyanGFX Library is a library for LCD Graphics driver with touch for ESP32 and SAMD51. It supports the TFT Touch Screen Display like ILI9163, ILI9342, ILI9341, ILI9486, ILI9488, ST7735, ST7789, ST7796, SSD1351. Download and add this library to the Arduino IDE.

The ESP32 Touch Camera use ILI9488 TFT Touch Display, which comes with resistive or capacitive screens. It has an OV2640 camera and SD card slot. It can be used as a webcam or an electronic album or a digital camera.

But in this project, we will use the product as a Touch Screen Camera. You can take photos with an OV2640 camera and preview them in real-time on a TFT screen. And then, you can save photos to the SD card in BMP Format. The photos that were taken can be later viewed through the TFT screen.

Unzip the code folder and then open the camera.ino file. The Arduino IDE will open with so many different tabs. In the code part, you need to make little changes as per the type of Touch Screen. Makes changes in the following line of the code to select the touchscreen type, either it is resistive or capacitive.

Since the embedded board has the 3.5″ Capacitive/Resistive TFT Touch Screen LCD Based on ILI9488, you can use it for painting or drawing applications. You can use your hand or stylus (resistance screen) to draw on the screen.

Unzip the code folder and then open the touch_draw_v2.ino file. The Arduino IDE will open with so many different tabs. Select/Comment/Uncomment the Capacitive or Resistive type Touch Screen Display in the code. And then you can upload the code to the ESP32 Dev Board.

After you upload the code, the TFT Display will start displaying the Dashboard with color selection on the side. You can choose any color and start drawing anything that you want.

Apart from taking pictures and drawing, you can use this ESP32 Touchscreen Display as a Slide Show Viewer. For this choose few pictures with resolution 480x320 and rename them as number 1, 2, 3, 4, ……, n. The Picture should be in.bmp format. The jpeg and png formats are not supported.

Unzip the code folder and then open the SD2TFT.ino file. The Arduino IDE will open with so many different tabs. You can now compile the code & upload the code to the ESP32 Dev Board. Such a cool ESP32 TFT Touch Screen Projects.

You can make more ESP32 TFT Display Projects using the same module. Thus ESP32 Touch Camera can be used in many application from gaming to drawing or imaging.

"Upper layer" main development board contains ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP, battery connector & charger circuit with LiPo charge status LEDs, Reset & pull-up IO0 buttons, and a green LED on GPIO4.

Clone of the SparkFun ESP32 Thing board. Compact ESP32 based development board with battery connector, and the typical development board component accoutrements.

Development board/module with ESP-WROOM-32 module, USB-to-UART, Reset & Boot (IO0) buttons, Li-ion battery connector & charger, two Grove connectors, LED on IO2, and three indicator LEDs.

The ESP32-LyraTD-MSC Audio-Mic HDK (hardware development kit) combines the ESP32-LyraTD-MSC ("audio-mic development board") with a secondary "top" board.

The ESP32 touch sensor development kit, ESP32-Sense Kit, is used for evaluating and developing ESP32 touch sensor system. ESP32-Sense Kit consists of one motherboard and multiple daughterboards. The motherboard contains a display unit, a main control unit and a debug unit. The daughterboards have touch electrodes in different combinations or shapes, such as linear slider, wheel slider, matrix buttons and spring buttons, depending on the application scenarios. Users can design and add their own daughterboards for special usage cases.

Features an xBee socket with switchable VCC voltage (3.3 V or 5 V), so 2G (SIM800) and 3G (SIM5360) xBee modules will work on it to provide cellular network access.

ESP-WROOM-32 based development board with SH1106 OLED display (128×64 pixels), RJ-45 Ethernet connector, CAN-bus connector, Micro USB connector, USB-to-UART bridge, LiPo battery connector and charging circuit.

Board with MEMS Microphone (ICS-43434) and class-D amplifier embedded 1-channel DAC (Maxim MAX98357A); intended for Amazon Alexa experimentation and development.

ESP32 development board with ePaper display, TI PCM5102A DAC, ICS43434 MEMS Microphone, CP2102N USB-to-UART bridge, microSD card slot, and LiPo charger.

Circular board with ESP-WROOM-32 module, Ethernet (LAN8720A), stereo audio CODEC (WM8978), microphone, 3.5 mm audio receptacle, USB-to-UART bridge (CP2104), Micro USB connector, and SD card slot.

Has column-similar/redundant dual-row connections along the longest sides for easier stand-alone use without a breadboard (but still could be used with a breadboard).

2× Ethernet (optional), 1× Serial Port RS-232/485, OLED 0.96″ 128×64 (optional), power supply with UPS (optional), U.FL (I-PEX) antenna mount(s), and ExCard extension modules support.

SPI0 is permanently reserved for cache access to the flash chip. SPI1 is connected to the same pins via an arbiter and is used to write to flash. You can use SPI1 to also write to other peripherals connected in parallel with the flash (but with another /CS), however, this is tricky to implement because it means you can"t simultaneously access flash anymore. Thats why it"s not in the driver yet.

Module with WiFi Espressif ESP32-S2. It has 4 MB of Flash memory, 2 MB of external PSRAM memory, integrated WiFi 802.11 b/g/n transceiver and a JST-PH 2.0 connector for connecting a LiPo battery. The board has a TFT LCD display and an RGB LED. FeatherS2 is easy to integrate with sensors due to the available STEMMA QT connector (Qwiic compatible).

ESP-LCD is a multimedia smart-control solution built around ESP32-S2-HMI-DevKit-1 and an LCD capacitive touch screen. With ESP-LCD, users can easily realize a hardware network, and achieve remote or smart-touch control, data visualization, music playback, recording, etc. ESP-LCD is suitable for several smart-control scenarios involving smart clocks, air-quality detectors, smart audio control, and various other applications based on touch screens.

ESP32-S2-HMI-DevKit-1 is a development board based on the ESP32-S2-WROVER module. It has a 4.3-inch TFT-LCD, and a capacitive touch panel with a resolution of up to 480×800 and an initial start-up time that is less than 200 ms. ESP32-S2-HMI-DevKit-1 has various components, including a light sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor, a MEMS sensor, a micro-SD card connector, a TWAI® interface (compatible with CAN 2.0) etc. On top of that, it also supports functions, such as LVGL GUI development, music playback, and recording.