2.8" TFT Touch Shield for Arduino with Resistive Touch Screen v2 - STEMMA QT / Qwiic

Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (2.8" diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colourful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240x320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. (We also have a capacitive-touch version of this shield here)

This shield uses the SPI port for sending data to the ILI9341 chipset display, and I2C for reading the TSC2007 resistive touch screen driver. That makes it work great with just about any board that is 'Arduino or Mega shaped' as long as they have the I2C SDA and SCL pins after pin D13, and the SPI 2x3 port. If you want to access the remaining pins, we recommend a WingShield

We recently did a big update to this design to add:

• TSC2007 Touch screen driver chip instead of STMPE811 (which was discontinued)
• Selectable VddIO for use with 3.3V or 5V chips - by default we use IOref but if your board does not have the IOref pin, you can solder the jumper closed for whatever voltage you like
• STEMMA QT port for quick connecting sensors and other I2C devices
• Right Angle Reset button is easier to press now

The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our libraries - you'll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino or Mega -shaped board.

This display shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. This shield needs only a few pins: five SPI pins for the display (SPI + DC and CS), I2C and IRQ pin for the touch screen, and an optional backlight pin. One more pin can be used for the micro SD card if you want to read images off of it.

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 and text. We also have a touch screen library that detects x, y and z (pressure) and example code to demonstrate all of it. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favourite microcontroller!

For people who want the same screen but not in a shield form-factor, check out our 2.8" TFT breakout

Revision History:

• As of September 21, 2023 – We have given this venerable board a makeover! This PCB has been revised to include a STEMMA QT connector so it can be plug-and-play with STEMMA QT cables and devices! It also now comes with a right-angle tactile button for the Bootloader switch. Lastly, we've also updated it with Adafruit Pinguin to make a lovely and legible silkscreen.

Specifications

• 240 x 320 resolution, 18-bit (262,000) colour - our library uses 16 bit color mode
• High speed SPI display with digital SPI touchscreen driver
• The display uses digital pins 9, 10 and SPI. Touchscreen controller requires I2C and pin #2 optional IRQ. microSD pin requires digital #4.
• Works with any classic Arduino or Mega shaped boards.
• Onboard 3.3V @ 300mA LDO regulator, current draw depends on usage but is about 100mA for the display and touchscreen
• 4 white LED backlight. On by default but you can connect the transistor to a digital pin for backlight control
• 4-wire resistive touchscreen attached to TSC2007 controller

Resources

• Datasheet
• Product Wiki