Adafruit 1.3″ 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 so small only 1.3″ diagonal but has a high density 260 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 caliber used in smartwatches and small electronic devices but they’ve always been MIPI interface. 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, colorful 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 1.3″ display has 240×240 16-bit full color pixels and is an IPS display, so the color looks great up to 80 degrees off 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 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

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 favorite 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.

Specifications

• 1.3″ 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: 26mm x 26mm / 1.02″ x 1.02″
• Overall dimension: 35.8mm x 35.8mm x 5.3mm
• Mounting hole distance: 33mm x 30mm / 1.3″ x 1.2″
• Weight (assembled): 7.6g

Revision History

• As of December 30, 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

• Primary Guide: Adafruit 1.3″ and 1.54″ 240×240 Wide Angle TFT LCD Displays

• CircuitPython Animated Sprite Pendants