Adafruit 3.5 TFT 320×480 with Capacitive Touch Breakout Board – EYESPI

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a colour touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (3.5′ diagonal) bright (6 white-LED backlights) and colourful! 480 x 320 pixels with individual RGB pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128 x 64 display, and double our 2.8′ TFT. As a bonus, this display has a capacitive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.

This display has a controller built into it with RAM buffering so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. The display can be used in two modes: 8-bit or 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, a set of I2C pins are required for the touch screen communication. If you’re feeling fancy there’s an IRQ pin for the touch screen detection. If you’re using just the SPI and I2C interfaces, you can use the built-in EYESPI connector for quick interfacing without a lot of wires!

Of course, we wouldn’t just leave you with a datasheet and a ‘good luck!’. Check out our detailed tutorial for wiring, testing and example code! 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 a touch screen library that detects up to 5 multi-touch points and example code to demonstrate all of it.

Resources

• Primary Guide