adafruit industries 1.8 color tft lcd made in china

The ST7789 TFT module contains a display controller with the same name: ST7789. It’s a color display that uses SPI interface protocol and requires 3, 4 or 5 control pins, it’s low cost and easy to use. This display is an IPS display, it comes in different sizes (1.3″, 1.54″ …) but all of them should have the same resolution of 240×240 pixel, this means it has 57600 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (not 5V tolerant).

As mentioned above, the ST7789 TFT display controller works with 3.3V only (power supply and control lines). The display module is supplied with 3.3V (between VCC and GND) which comes from the Arduino board.

The first library is a driver for the ST7789 TFT display which can be installed from Arduino IDE library manager (Sketch —> Include Library —> Manage Libraries …, in the search box write “st7789” and install the one from Adafruit).

Adafruit 1.8" Color TFT Shield w/microSD and Joystickis the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project.Adafruittook the popular 1.8" TFT breakout board and remixed it into an Arduino shield complete with microSD card slot and a 5-way joystick navigation!

Adafruit 1.8" Color TFT Shield w/microSD and Joystick has the TFT display soldered on as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so it’s safe to use with 5V Arduinos. There is also some space left over, so a microSD card holder and a 5-way navigation switch are added. Note that the microSD card is not included.

If you just want to display text, shapes, lines, pixels, etc., the shield uses pins 13, 11, 10 and 8. If you"d like to add the navigation switch, it uses Analog 3. For the microSD card, you"ll also give up Digital 12 and 4. This shield works best with the Arduino UNO and compatibles. You can use it with the Mega but it won"t be as fast since it would be using software rather than hardware SPI for both the TFT and SD card, so it"s not recommended.

Adafruit 1.8" Color TFT Shield w/microSD and Joystick comes as a fully assembled and tested shield with the display, microSD card holder and nav switch with knob as well as a stick of 0.1” header. To finish up and use, you will need to solder on the header onto the shield PCB, a quick 10 minute task.

The TFT display is a kind of liquid crystal LCD that is connected to each pixel using a transistor and it features low current consumption, high-quality, high-resolution and backlight. This 1.8-inch full color LCD has a narrow PCB screen. The resolution is 128×160 pixels and it has a four-wire SPI interface and white backlight. The driver is ST7735R.

In this video you can see how I created a mock up display of the classic Nintendo Donkey Kong game on an Arduino Uno. The display module used is an ST7735S 80×160 TFT screen sourced from eBay.

I didn’t have too many problems using this module. The main issue was the color codes were different to those specified in the GFX library. There is also some flickering at the top and right hand side of the display.