Adafruit 1.69" 280x240 Round Rectangle Color IPS TFT Display (ST7789)

Add a unique touch to your electronics projects with this sleek, curved-edge 1.69" TFT display. With its high-density 220 ppi resolution and 280x240 full-color pixels, this display offers vibrant visuals and excellent viewing angles thanks to its IPS technology. Ideal for use in smartwatches and small devices, this display uses an SPI interface, making it compatible with any microcontroller or microcomputer.

This compact display is perfect for adding a small, colorful, and bright screen to any project. It communicates via 4-wire SPI and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, allowing it to work with even the smallest microcontrollers with limited memory and pins. The IPS display provides great color accuracy up to 80 degrees off-axis in any direction, and the TFT driver (ST7789) is similar to the popular ST7735, with full support from our Arduino library.

The display has rounded corners, which are achieved by not displaying certain pixels in the corners (the pixels are still addressed in RAM, just not visible). This means you can treat the display as a regular rectangle, without needing to do any special pixel mapping.

The breakout board comes fully assembled with the TFT display soldered onto it. It also includes an ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator, auto-reset circuitry, and a 3/5V level shifter, allowing you to use the display with both 3.3V and 5V power and logic. Additionally, there’s a microSD card slot for loading full-color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card (microSD card not included).

We’ve made it easy to get started with a fully open-source Arduino graphics library that can handle pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and bitmaps, along with example code. The library is written for Arduino but can be easily adapted to other microcontrollers. We recommend using hardware SPI pins for faster performance, though software SPI is an option. For Raspberry Pi and other Single Board Computer users, we offer a Pillow-compatible Python library, and for CircuitPython, there’s native support via the displayio driver.

This display also features an 18-pin "EYE SPI" FPC connector with a flip-top connector for easy wiring. You can use an 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable to connect to the GPIO pins, making soldering optional.

Technical Details:

• Display Size: 1.69" LCD TFT
• Built-in microSD slot
• 4 x 0.1" / 2.5mm mounting holes in corners
• TFT screen dimensions: 38mm x 30mm (1.5" x 1.2")
• Overall dimensions: 45.8mm x 36.8mm x 5.4mm (1.8" x 1.4" x 0.2")
• EYE SPI 18-pin FPC Connector Pinout:
  • VIN (3 to 5V DC power)
  • Backlight (3~5V logic PWM optional input)
  • Ground
  • SPI Clock (3~5V logic in)
  • SPI MOSI (3~5V logic Microcontroller Out, Screen/SD In)
  • SPI MISO (3~5V logic Microcontroller In, Screen/SD Out)
  • TFT Data/Command (3~5V logic in)
  • TFT Reset (optional 3~5V logic in)
  • TFT SPI Chip Select (3~5V logic in)
  • SD Card SPI Chip Select (3~5V logic in)
  • Unused Pins

Revision History:

• September 10, 2024: Updated PCB with Adafruit Pinguin for improved silkscreen design. You may receive the new or older version, both are functionally identical.

Product Dimensions:

• 45.8mm x 36.8mm x 5.4mm (1.8" x 1.4" x 0.2")

Product Weight:

• 9.9g / 0.3oz