ESP32-S3 based 1.28-inch round touchscreen display supports Arduino programming

Makerfabs “ESP32-S3 Round SPI TFT with Touch 1.28″ is a small ESP32-S3 with a 1.28-inch round color touchscreen display, a microSD card, support for USB and battery power, and two “Mabee” extension connectors.

The board joins other ESP32-S3 round display boards such as the Lilygo T-RGB board or Seeed Studio’s Round Display for XIAO, but with a thinner design, and a square PCB with trimmed corners instead of a round PCB like the other two.

ESP32-S3 Round SPI TFT with Touch 1.28″ (E32S3128GC) specifications:

Wireless MCU – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3R8 dual-core Tensilica LX7 microcontroller @ 240 MHz with vector extension, 512KB SRAM, 8MB PSRAM, Wi-Fi 4 & Bluetooth 5.0 dual-mode (Classic + BLE) connectivity
Flash – 128 Mbit (16MB) W25Q128JV SPI flash, microSD card slot
Display – 1.28-inch round LCD with 240×240 resolution (GC9A01 SPI driver), touchscreen controller (CST816S)
USB – 1x USB Type-C port
Expansion
- 1x 4-pin Mabee I2C connector for compatible expansion modules.
- 1x 4-pin Mabee GPIO connector
Misc – Reset and Flash buttons
Power Supply
- 5V (4.0V to 5.25V) via USB Type-C port
- 2-pin jST connector for 3.7V Lipo battery
Dimensions – Around 32.5 x 36 mm
Temperature Range – -40 to +85

The company provides hardware and software documentation in the board’s wiki, as well as several Arduino samples, as demonstrated in the video above, in GitHub, where you’ll also find PDF and EAGLE schematics. Arduino samples include code to draw a JPEG, go through animated GIFs, an LVGL graphics demo/benchmark, a clock that looks like a mechanical watch, and a demo to draw text and various shapes on the display.

Makerfabs is selling the “ESP32-S3 Round SPI TFT with Touch 1.28″” board (maybe they could have come up with a shorter name) on their online shop for $29.80 plus shipping. They also have a bunch of other ESP32 Series rectangular displays ranging from 3.2-inch to 4.3-inch in size.The ESP32-S3 round display from Makerfabs is cheaper than the Lilygo model (now around $37 including shipping), but the latter is slightly larger at 2.1-inch and offers a higher 480×480 resolution.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.