This shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up the library – you’ll have it running in under 10 minutes! Works best with any classic Arduino (UNO/Duemilanove/Freeduino). This TFT display is big (2.8″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display.

The original v1 shield has been updated to an SPI display – its a tiny bit slower but uses a lot less pins and is now much easier to use with Mega & Leonardo. We also include an SPI touchscreen controller so you only need one additional pin to add a high quality touchscreen controller.

The TFT Touchscreen shield has a controller built into it with RAM buffering, so that almost no work is done by the microcontroller. The shield does require a lot of pins: 12 lines total for the display, 13 total if you use the microSD card

Specifications:

• 2.8″ diagonal color touchscreen TFT
• 240×320 resolution, 18-bit (262,000) color – our library uses 16 bit color mode
• ILI9341 (datasheet) controller with built in video RAM buffer
• STMPE610 touch screen controller
• High speed SPI display with digital SPI touchscreen driver
• The display uses digital pins 13-9. Touchscreen controller requires digital pin 8. microSD pin requires digital #4. That means you can use digital pins 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and analog 0-5. Pin 4 is available if not using the microSD
• Works with any classic Arduino ‘328. Solder closed three jumpers to use the ICSP header for use with Leonardo or Mega
• 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 STMPE610 controller

Useful links:

• Eagle files & Schematics
• Touch screen library
• TFT LCD library
• Latest SD card library

Library:
Full open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. 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 favorite microcontroller!

Please Note: This shield does work with the Arduino Mega’s but its going to be half the speed of the Uno-type boards because of the way the Mega rearranges all the pins (there is no way to get around this!)