Adafruit Rectangle Color IPS TFT Display 1.69" 280x240 - ST7789

Don't be such a square - throw a curve-ball into your electronics with a curved-edge miniature display. Here's a new "round rect" TFT display - it's 1.69" diagonal and has a high-density 220 ppi, 280x240 full color pixels with IPS any-angle viewing. 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 1.69" display has 280x240 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.

Note that the way we get the rounded corners is by deleting pixels. The corner pixels are still addressed in RAM, they just don't appear, so it isn't like you have to do some special radial-pixel mapping. Treat it like a rectangular display.

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.

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.

This display breakout also features a 18-pin "EYE SPI" standard FPC connector with flip-top connector. You can use a 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable to connect to all the GPIO pins, for when you want to skip the soldering.

Technical Details

Specifications:

• 1.69" LCD TFT display
• Built-in microSD slot
• 1x11 header for easy breadboarding
• 4 x 0.1" / 2.5mm mounting holes in corners
• TFT screen dimensions: 38mm x 30mm / 1.5" x 1.2"
• Overall dimension: 45.8mm x 36.8mm x 5.4mm / 1.8" x 1.4" x 0.2"
• Mounting holes: 1.5" x 1.2"

EYE SPI 18-pin FPC Connector:

1. VIN (3 to 5V DC power)
2. Backlight (3~5V logic PWM optional input)
3. Ground
4. SPI Clock (3~5V logic in)
5. SPI MOSI (3~5V logic Microcontroller Out, Screen/SD In)
6. SPI MISO (3~5V logic Microcontroller In, Screen/SD Out)
7. TFT Data/Command (3~5V logic in)
8. TFT Reset (optional 3~5V logic in)
9. TFT SPI Chip Select (3~5V logic in)
10. SD Card SPI Chip Select (3~5V logic in)
11. Unused
12. Unused
13. Unused
14. Unused
15. Unused
16. Unused
17. Unused
18. Unused

Product Dimensions: 45.8mm x 36.8mm x 5.4mm / 1.8" x 1.4" x 0.2"

Product Weight: 9.9g / 0.3oz