esp32 lcd screen price

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!~

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.

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.

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.

This is a 1.5" 128 x 128 color OLED, this form factor is very fit for smart-watch-like wearable project. The most barrier of select this should be the price tag is around 4 times of a normal LCD.

ST7735 is a very popular LCD driver model for the resolution 128x128 and 128x160. It may cause by its popularity, there are many manufacturer produce compatible product. However, they are not fully compatible.

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.

It is a 2.2" 176x220 color LCD. It is relatively fewer projects using this chips and resolution. It may caused by the success of its chip family brother, ILI9341 (0.2" larger in size but have near double resolution).

Lower resolution still have its advantages, e.g. it can save half of the processing power on decoding the full screen size JPEG image and double the FPS ;>

I think ILI9341 is the most popular LCD driver chip in the hobby electronics market. In most case it is 240x320 resolution and have many screen size from 1.7" to 3.5". Some breakout board also built-in touch screen feature.

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.

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).

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.

#define LOAD_GLCD // Font 1. Original Adafruit 8 pixel font needs ~1820 bytes in FLASH
#define LOAD_FONT2 // Font 2. Small 16 pixel high font, needs ~3534 bytes in FLASH, 96 characters

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.

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.

It is very important to read the data sheet first before you decide not using breakout board. The pins layout, pin pitch size, the sample circuit connection and maximum rating all you can find in data sheet. The maximum voltage is especially important, you should sticky follow the rating or you will blow your LCD. The chip can operate in 3.3 V but LED may be 2.8 - 3.0 V so it require some electronics in the middle, most data sheet have the sample circuit. You may ask your seller send a soft copy of data sheet to you or simply Google it by the model number.

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:

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

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,?,?,?,?)?

IoTs2 is a small-sized, low-power, low-cost, high-performance IoT embedded system. IoTs2 not only supports wired low-speed real-time network interfaces such as UART (or RS485), CANBus, and USB interfaces, but also supports WiFi (2.4GHz) high-speed wireless network interfaces. In addition to the on-board programmable buttons, indicators, RGB lights, retina-level color LCD, acceleration sensors and other resources, IoTs2 has 18 programmable I/Os (arranged in DIP).

A few weeks ago, we examined the features of ESP32 module and built a simple hello world program to get ourselves familiar with the board. Today, we will continue our exploration of the ESP32 on a higher level as we will look at how to interface a 16×2 LCD with it.

Displays provide a fantastic way of providing feedback to users of any project and with the 16×2 LCD being one of the most popular displays among makers, and engineers, its probably the right way to start our exploration. For today’s tutorial, we will use an I2C based 16×2 LCD display because of the easy wiring it requires. It uses only four pins unlike the other versions of the display that requires at least 7 pins connected to the microcontroller board.

ESP32 comes in a module form, just like its predecessor, the ESP-12e, as a breakout board is usually needed to use the module. Thus when it’s going to be used in applications without a custom PCB, it is easier to use one of the development boards based on it. For today’s tutorial, we will use the DOIT ESP32 DevKit V1 which is one of the most popular ESP32 development boards.

The schematics for this project is relatively simple since we are connecting just the LCD to the DOIT Devkit v1. Since we are using I2C for communication, we will connect the pins of the LCD to the I2C pins of the DevKit. Connect the components as shown below.

Due to the power requirements of the LCD, it may not be bright enough when connected to the 3.3v pin of the ESP32. If that is the case, connect the VCC pin of the LCD to the Vin Pin of the ESP32 so it can draw power directly from the connected power source.

At this point, it is important to note that a special setup is required to enable you to use the Arduino IDE to program ESP32 based boards. We covered this in the introduction to ESP32 tutorial published a few weeks go. So, be sure to check it out.

To be able to easily write the code to interact with the I2C LCD display, we will use the I2C LCD library. The Library possesses functions and commands that make addressing the LCD easy. Download the I2C LCD library from the link attached and install on the Arduino IDE by simply extracting it into the Arduino’s library folder.

Before writing the code for the project, it’s important for us to know the I2C address of the LCD as we will be unable to talk to the display without it.

While some of the LCDs come with the address indicated on it or provided by the seller, in cases where this is not available, you can determine the address by using a simple sketch that sniffs the I2C line to detect what devices are connected alongside their address. This sketch is also a good way to test the correctness of your wiring or to determine if the LCD is working properly.

If you keep getting “no devices found”, it might help to take a look at the connections to be sure you didn’t mix things up and you could also go ahead and try 0x27 as the I2C address. This is a common address for most I2C LCD modules from China.

Our task for today’s tutorial is to display both static and scrolling text on the LCD, and to achieve that, we will use the I2C LCD library to reduce the amount of code we need to write. We will write two separate sketches; one to displaystatic textsand the other to display both static and scrolling text.

To start with the sketch for static text display, we start the code by including the library to be used for it, which in this case, is the I2C LCD library.

Next, we create an instance of the I2C LCD library class with the address of the display, the number of columns the display has (16 in this case), and the number of rows (2 in this case) as arguments.

With that done, we proceed to the void setup() function. Here we initialize the display and issue the command to turn the backlight on as it might be off by default depending on the LCD.

Next is the void loop() function. The idea behind the code for the loop is simple, we start by setting the cursor to the column and row of the display where we want the text to start from, and we proceed to display the text using the lcd.print() function. To allow the text to stay on the screen for a while (so its visible) before the loop is reloaded, we delay the code execution for 1000ms.

Next, we create an instance of the I2C LCD library class with the address of the display, the number of columns the display has (16 in this case), and the number of rows (2 in this case) as arguments.

Next, we create the function to display scrolling text. The function accepts four arguments; the row on which to display the scrolling text, the text to be displayed, the delay time between the shifting of characters, and the number of columns of the LCD.

That’s it for today’s tutorial guys. Thanks for following this tutorial. This cheap LCD display provides a nice way of providing visual feedback for your project and even though the size of the screen and the quality of the display is limited, with the scrolling function you can increase the amount of text/characters that can be displayed.

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Want to display sensor readings in your ESP32 projects without resorting to serial output? Then an I2C LCD display might be a better choice for you! It consumes only two GPIO pins which can also be shared with other I2C devices.

True to their name, these LCDs are ideal for displaying only text/characters. A 16×2 character LCD, for example, has an LED backlight and can display 32 ASCII characters in two rows of 16 characters each.

At the heart of the adapter is an 8-bit I/O expander chip – PCF8574. This chip converts the I2C data from an ESP32 into the parallel data required for an LCD display.

If you are using multiple devices on the same I2C bus, you may need to set a different I2C address for the LCD adapter so that it does not conflict with another I2C device.

An important point here is that several companies manufacture the same PCF8574 chip, Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors, to name a few. And the I2C address of your LCD depends on the chip manufacturer.

So your LCD probably has a default I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it.

Connecting I2C LCD to ESP32 is very easy as you only need to connect 4 pins. Start by connecting the VCC pin to the VIN on the ESP32 and GND to ground.

Now we are left with the pins which are used for I2C communication. We are going to use the default I2C pins (GPIO#21 and GPIO#22) of the ESP32. Connect the SDA pin to the ESP32’s GPIO#21 and the SCL pin to the ESP32’s GPIO#22.

After wiring up the LCD you’ll need to adjust the contrast of the display. On the I2C module you will find a potentiometer that you can rotate with a small screwdriver.

Plug in the ESP32’s USB connector to power the LCD. You will see the backlight lit up. Now as you turn the knob on the potentiometer, you will start to see the first row of rectangles. If that happens, Congratulations! Your LCD is working fine.

The I2C address of your LCD depends on the manufacturer, as mentioned earlier. If your LCD has a Texas Instruments’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x27Hex. If your LCD has NXP Semiconductors’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x3FHex.

So your LCD probably has I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it. Luckily there’s an easy way to do this. Below is a simple I2C scanner sketch that scans your I2C bus and returns the address of each I2C device it finds.

After uploading the code, open the serial monitor at a baud rate of 115200 and press the EN button on the ESP32. You will see the I2C address of your I2C LCD display.

But, before you proceed to upload the sketch, you need to make a small change to make it work for you. You must pass the I2C address of your LCD and the dimensions of the display to the constructor of the LiquidCrystal_I2C class. If you are using a 16×2 character LCD, pass the 16 and 2; If you’re using a 20×4 LCD, pass 20 and 4. You got the point!

In ‘setup’ we call three functions. The first function is init(). It initializes the LCD object. The second function is clear(). This clears the LCD screen and moves the cursor to the top left corner. And third, the backlight() function turns on the LCD backlight.

After that we set the cursor position to the third column of the first row by calling the function lcd.setCursor(2, 0). The cursor position specifies the location where you want the new text to be displayed on the LCD. The upper left corner is assumed to be col=0, row=0.

lcd.scrollDisplayRight() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the right. If you want the text to scroll continuously, you have to use this function inside a for loop.

lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the left. Similar to above function, use this inside a for loop for continuous scrolling.

If you find the characters on the display dull and boring, you can create your own custom characters (glyphs) and symbols for your LCD. They are extremely useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.

CGROM is used to store all permanent fonts that are displayed using their ASCII codes. For example, if we send 0x41 to the LCD, the letter ‘A’ will be printed on the display.

CGRAM is another memory used to store user defined characters. This RAM is limited to 64 bytes. For a 5×8 pixel based LCD, only 8 user-defined characters can be stored in CGRAM. And for 5×10 pixel based LCD only 4 user-defined characters can be stored.

Creating custom characters has never been easier! We have created a small application called Custom Character Generator. Can you see the blue grid below? You can click on any 5×8 pixel to set/clear that particular pixel. And as you click, the code for the character is generated next to the grid. This code can be used directly in your ESP32 sketch.

After the library is included and the LCD object is created, custom character arrays are defined. The array consists of 8 bytes, each byte representing a row of a 5×8 LED matrix. In this sketch, eight custom characters have been created.

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 guide we’re going to show you how you can use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire the display, write text, draw shapes and display images on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT is a colorful display with 128 x 160 color pixels. The display can load images from an SD card – it has an SD card slot at the back. The following figure shows the screen front and back view.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.