This lovely little shield is the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project. We took our popular 1.8″ TFT breakout board and remixed it into an Arduino shield complete with microSD card slot and a 5-way joystick navigation switch (with a nice plastic knob)! Since the display uses only 4 pins to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used easily to add a display & interface without exhausting the memory or pins. The 1.8″ display has 128×160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost «Nokia 6110″ and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!). The shield has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as a ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator and a 3/5V level shifter so its safe to use with 5V Arduinos. We also had some space left over so we placed a microSD card holder (so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card) and a 5-way navigation switch (left, right, up, down, select). The microSD card is not included. If you just want to display text, shapes, lines, pixels, etc the shield uses pins 13, 11, 10 and 8. If you’d like to add the navigation switch, it uses Analog 3 (all 5 switches are connected using a clever resistor trick to permit all the switches to share one analog pin). For the microSD card, you’ll also give up Digital 12 and 4. This shield works best with the Peakduino/Arduino UNO and compatibles. You can use it with the Mega but it won’t be as fast since it would be using software rather than hardware SPI for both the TFT and SD card, so it’s not recommended. An extra breakout for Single Lead AD8232 Heart Rate Monitor. Which means you could plug the Single Lead AD8232 Heart Rate Monitor into the Shield directly.
TECHNICAL DETAILS Specifications: 1.8″ diagonal LCD TFT display Physical dimensions: 2.71″ (69mm) width, 2.1″ (53.5mm) height, 0.27» (6.94mm) thickness (top of joystick) 128×160 resolution, 18-bit (262,144) color ST7735R (datasheet) controller with built in pixel-addressable video RAM buffer 4 wire SPI digital interface Built-in microSD slot – uses 2 more digital lines 5V compatible! Use with 3.3V or 5V logic Arduinos Onboard 3.3V @ 150mA LDO regulator 2 white LED backlight, transistor connected. Defaults to ‘on’ but can be connected to a digital pin for PWM or simply turning off Display current draw is mostly based on the backlight, with full backlight the current draw is ~100mA, this does not include the SD Card. SD cards can draw 20-100mA based on read/write. Measure current draw in circuit to get precise numbers.