1.8″ Color TFT LCD display with MicroSD Card Breakout – ST7735R

Description

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and 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 1.8″ display has 128×160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost “Nokia 6110” and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!). And the LCD will always come with the same driver chip so there's no worries that your code will not work from one to the other.

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. We also had a little 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.

Of course, we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a “good luck!” – we've written a full open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text and bitmaps as well as example code and a wiring tutorial. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller!

Specifications:

1.8″ diagonal LCD TFT display
128×160 resolution, 18-bit (262,144) color
ST7735R (datasheet) controller with built in pixel-addressable video RAM buffer
4 or 5 wire SPI digital interface
Built-in microSD slot – uses 2 more digital lines
5V compatible! Use with 3.3V or 5V logic
Onboard 3.3V @ 150mA LDO regulator
2 white LED backlight, transistor connected so you can PWM dim the backlight
1×10 header for easy breadboarding
4 x 0.9″/2mm mounting holes in corners
Overall dimensions: 1.35″ x 2.2″ x 0.25″ (34mm x 56mm x 6.5mm)
Current draw is based on LED backlight usage: with full backlight draw is ~50mA

Downloads:

ST7735R datasheet

JD-T1800 display datasheet

You can download our Arduino library with examples from github. To install it, rename the downloaded and uncompressed library to ST7735 and place in the sketchfolder/libraries folder. See our detailed tutorial for more info.

Open source graphics library, example code and a wiring tutorial

Netduino driver, Netduino sample and documentation. This sample is a demo displaying pictures and animations on the display.

Additional information