Introduction

Within this guide, we’ll show you how to use a SPI controlled TFT Screen. For this we’ll use the Adafruit 1.47" 320x172 Round Rectangle Color IPS TFT Display.

It’s a ST7789 board that uses SPI to communicate with and update the screen.

For this exploration, you’ll need

• an Arduino Nano BLE Sense
• Adafruit 1.47" 320x172 Round Rectangle Color IPS TFT Display or any ST7789 or ST7735 compatible TFT (and there’s many)
• Hookup wire

What’s an TFT Screen good for:

An TFT lets you create anything you could put on the screen of a computer. The pixels are tightly packed so you get much richer outputs than an LED matrix or LED strip. The downside is that it’s more complex to control. You can:

• Write text to the screen e.g. a status message or the current reading from a sensor
• Draw simple graphics like rectangles, squares and create compositions
• Present bitmap images to display complex icons, images or avatars.
• Create animations and moving images.

About the screen

Above are two images of the screen— back and front. Take a moment to inspect it. It highlight a few details.

1. It’s relatively small — just 1.47” on the diagonal. However, it’s crammed full of pixels and boasts an impressive 250 pixel per inch resolution. That amounts to 172 x 320 pixels that can display full color!