We’ve been looking for a display like this for a long time – it’s only 1.5″ diagonal but has a high density 220 ppi, 240×240 pixel display with full-angle viewing. It looks a lot like our 1.44″ 128×128 display, but has 4x as many pixels and looks great at any angle.

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and very bright display to any project. Since the display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available! The 1.54″ display has 240×240 16-bit full color pixels and is an IPS display, so the color looks great up to 80 degrees off axis in any direction. The TFT driver (ST7789) is very similar to the popular ST7735, and our Arduino library supports it well.

The breakout has the TFT display soldered on (it uses a delicate flex-circuit connector) as well as an ultra-low-dropout 3.3V regulator, auto-reset circuitry, and a 3/5V level shifter so you can use it with 3.3V or 5V power and logic. We also had a little extra space, so we placed a microSD card holder so you can easily load full color bitmaps from a FAT16/FAT32 formatted microSD card. The microSD card is not included.

We provide a full open-source graphics Arduino library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and bitmaps as well as example code. The code is written for Arduino but can be easily ported to your favorite microcontroller! Wiring is easy, we strongly encourage using the hardware SPI pins of your Arduino as software SPI is noticeably slower when dealing with this size display. For Raspberry Pi or other Single Board Computer Python users, we have a user-space Pillow-compatible library. For CircuitPython there’s a displayio driver for native support.

This display breakout features an 18-pin “EYESPI” standard FPC connector with flip-top connector. You can use a 18-pin 0.5mm pitch FPC cable (not included) to connect to all the GPIO pins, for when you want to skip the soldering.

Please note: This display is designed for smart watches and similar, where there’s a glass over the screen. Without something gently holding the screen down, the backlight can eventually peel away from the TFT. It’s not destructive but unattractive. You can prevent this by adding a plastic or glass cover/overlay or using a thin piece of tape or a touch of craft glue on the edges.