The ESP32 is the successor to the wildly popular ESP8266. There seems to be no end to what the chips can do. However, despite all the wireless communication capabilities, the module doesn’t have a display. [G6EJD] wanted to connect an ILI9341 TFT display and he put the code and information on GitHub. You can also see a video of his work, below.

Since the display uses a serial interface, there isn’t much wiring required. The Adafruit GFX library does the heavy lifting, utilizing the SPI library for the actual communications. The first demo shown on the hardware can pull weather data decoded. If you want more details on the display’s operation, check out [G6EJD’s] YouTube channel and you’ll find other videos that go into more detail.

We’ve seen these displays married to an ESP8266 with an integrated PCB, too. There’s a choice of libraries, and perhaps we’ll see a similar range of choice for the ESP32.

Neat. Something like this is on my project bucket list. Keep up the good work.

Nice… ;-) So version 1.3 will have LCD Display + Touch + tjpgd ? http://esp32.info/docs/esp_idf/html/dd/dd0/tjpgd_8h.html

Somebody with time-off will make it happen for sure…

That would be handy, you can do almost everything on a Linux back-end and just just push JPG renders to the ESP32 client and have it send touch events back. On a screen that small it would be very responsive even for multiple clients, such as a one smart panel per room scenario.

Nice GUI, which Framework is in use?

I don’t like wires.

I don’t like mosquitoes.

“I don’t like spiders and snakes, but that ain’t …” ;-)

How to use ILI9341 with ESP32 : connect SPI device to SPI microcontroler, download Adafruit lib, you’re good to go. However, I think some other projects by same author would be much more interesting to feature, like this same config (ILI9341+ESP32) that downloads data from WeatherUnderground and displays it in very neat way.

I’d like to point out also my own ESP8266 + ILI9341 project, where I implemented a new graphic library to avoid the flickering during screen refresh with a frame buffer. Porting this to the ESP32 would be a nice treat since I am running low on memory with the ESP8266 quite quickly. If you are interested please have a look, I think the WeatherStation color project looks quite nice: https://blog.squix.org/2017/07/new-weatherstation-color-version-published.html

Someone mentioned this may not be an actual “Wemos” but NTL, pretty awesome for ~$10.50:

https://m.banggood.com/Wemos-Lolin-ESP32-OLED-Module-For-Arduino-ESP32-OLED-WiFi-Bluetooth-Dual-ESP-32-ESP-32S-ESP8266-p-1148119.html

Other dev boards can be found for less than ~$7, especially on AliExpress, such as this one with a battery charger integrated:

https://m.aliexpress.com/s/item/32808551116.html?trace=storeDetail2msiteDetail#autostay

Though it looks like there’s still a lot of revision 0 ICs in stock, for whoever’s tracking that.

Any word on the framerate? I’ve been learning the hard way that large color displays need a lot of code optimization / DMA on most controllers.

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