2.8 TFT LCD with Cap Touch Breakout Board w/MicroSD Socket – EYESPI Connector

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a colour-capacitive touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (2.8′ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlights) and colourful! 240 x 320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control have way more resolution than a black and white 128 x 64 display. As a bonus, this display has a capacitive single-touch touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. (We also have a resistive touchscreen version of this display breakout)

This display has a controller built into it with RAM buffering so that the microcontroller does almost no work. The display can be used in two modes: 8-bit and SPI. For 8-bit mode, you’ll need 8 digital data lines and 4 or 5 digital control lines to read and write to the display (12 lines total). SPI mode requires only 5 pins total (SPI data in, data out, clock, select, and d/c) but is slower than 8-bit mode. In addition, 2 I2C pins are required for the touchscreen controller.

We wrapped up this display into an easy-to-use breakout board, with SPI connections on one end and 8-bit on the other. Both are 3-5V compliant with high-speed level shifters so you can use any microcontroller. If you’re going with SPI mode, you can also take advantage of the onboard MicroSD card socket to display images. (The microSD card is not included, but any will work)

Of course, we wouldn’t just leave you with a datasheet and a ‘good luck!’. For 8-bit interface fans, we’ve written a full open-source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and more. For SPI users, we have a library as well, it’s separate from the 8-bit library since both versions are heavily optimised. We also have an interfacing library for the capacitive touchscreen

Follow our step-by-step guide for wiring, code, and drawing. You’ll be running in 15 minutes.

If you are using an Arduino-shaped microcontroller, check out our TFT shield version of this same display

Revision History

• As of June 6th, 2024 – we’ve updated this TFT breakout with an 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.

Specifications

• Board: 81.3mm x 62.5mm
• Screen: 69.6mm x 45.2mm
• Mounting Holes: 76.2mm x 57.2mm
• Weight: 44g

Resources

• Datasheets and Files
• CST026-A Datasheet (Chinese)
• TFT Display Datasheet