Adafruit 1.28 240×240 Round TFT LCD Display with MicroSD – GC9A01A with EYESPI Connector

‘Round these parts, we enjoy unusually-shaped displays. And this one certainly fits the description – it’s a 1.28′ diagonal TFT that comes in a round shape and contains a high density 220 ppi, 240×240 pixel RGB display with full-angle viewing. It looks a lot like our 1.54’ 240×240 square display, but with the edges bevelled off. We’ve seen displays like this often 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 all microcontrollers or microcomputers!

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, round, colourful 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 1.28′ display has 240×240 16-bit full-colour pixels and is an IPS display, so the colour looks great up to 80 degrees off-axis in any direction. The TFT driver (GC9A01A) is very similar to the popular ST7789, 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-colour 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 favourite 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 contributed display io driver for native support.

This display breakout also features an 18-pin ‘EYESPI’ standard FPC connector with a flip-top connector. You can use an 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable (not included!) to connect to all the GPIO pins, for when you want to skip the soldering.

Specifications

• 1.28′ LCD TFT display
• Built-in microSD slot 
• 1×16 header for easy breadboarding
• 2 x 0.1′ / 2.5mm mounting holes
• LCD screen dimensions: 38.1mm x 35.6mm
• Overall dimensions: 42.4mm x 36.2mm x 5.4mm
• Mounting hole distance: 22.8mm
• Weight (assembled): 8.3g

Resources

• TFT Display Datasheet