 The great search brought to you by did you gain a different every single legal more users or powers of engineering to help you Yes, you find the things that you need on digikey.com a data. What is the great search this week? Okay this week we had a very popular project at the floppy disk USB drive and it uses a pipe portal and the pipe portal Which also I can hold on in the shop. I'll show the pipe portal because this was actually Sorry, yes Because it's actually has the fancy digikey logo. This was a partnership project that we did with digikey But it's a little bit old. It is long in the tooth as they say which is weird because like people's teeth don't get longer but anyways It's the same D51 plus an ESP 32 and it could use a re spinning because this is you know quite a few years old now We can finally get more chips and also like this did suffer a lot from the part shortage because the samd 51 wasn't available and one thing that's kind of neat is the new ESP 32 s3 Chips that are out now. So this is like the ESP 32 box. Let me just go to a dev for I don't think we have a dev kit that has a tft yet. So We have some dev kits. So one of the new peripherals that's available on the ESP 32 s3 Let me pull up the data sheet Is oh, this is not the full This is not the full depth sheet. I think but one of the interesting peripherals that's available on the ESP 32 s3 is that it can drive TTL displays like so normally like on the the pipe portal What we've got is Parallel display that's like eight We've got here is a 320 by 240 SPI or like 6800 or 8080 type display where you're using the frame buffer inside of the display It has memory inside and you write to it with SPI You just kind of like send pixels really fast but you you know, you write the pixels and they're they're stayed on the display and These displays are great for microcontrollers with low memory Because you just say like okay. I want to write some pixels over in the corner. You put those displays There's another kind of display where you write TTL data. Let's call it called TTL data Or dot clock is another way they're called and so these are second tft 55 inch so these displays The five inch like tft 40 pin These you have to write the data continuously and the VRAM is stored on the device So they have a less refresh flicker Refresh flicker because you write the entire display at once like you're constantly rastering the display on But you have to have something that has a peripheral to do that You can't bit bang it because you have to be drawing the pixels very quickly But the trade-off is you can drive much bigger displays SPI displays they tend to max out at like maybe 320 by 480 But usually they're 320 by 240 there and once you get to 480 by 320 it actually gets a little slow It's like tough to actually draw that much display. You get a low frame rate Whereas with these TTL displays these tft displays you can go quite fast fast So I thought we'd go or just a key. I don't forget they have these cool RGB USB ports And let's look for tft display okay, so a Couple options here, but Even though it's not a So literally like a tft is a kind of LCD, but usually LCDs means something different Still it would be under the opto electronics graphic display and One thing that's interesting is that did you he has a really wide range So first off you've got displays like this and you can even tell it doesn't have that many pins. So, you know that this isn't a TTL like clock set out style display. This is like SPI most likely, but this isn't Always indicated. So this one's like SPI and then parallel 16 bit RGB this Usually means that it's still like you have to you know, write eight to six eight to sixteen pins and you you latch it So it still has the memory inside But there should be a couple options that are bigger So yeah now once you get to like this when you see like that 40 pin display at the bottom the 40 pin connector These tend to be TTL So let's take a look at what these are called because you can see they're all they're all mixed up together like there is You know this style and then there's like this plug-in style the ones with 40 pins, but this one is SPI, you know, it's still confusing. So let's go over here So these are called parallel 24 bit RGB Which makes sense because you end up having to have 24 pins for eight red with eight green eight blue And then you have v-sync h-sync dot clock and then Enable display enable or something So let's look for other displays that are of this type. So I'm actually going to cheat I'm gonna go over here and I'm just going to select color tft and parallel 24 bit RGB and they also only want active and There's actually quite a few Options and let's sort by price So 4.3 inches another popular size this was really popular for GPS And like handheld gaming Please note that there's also a couple times where you get displays and they have like backpacks and stuff built into them So just watch out for that There's resistive touch which you can see this has kind of like a Like a white outline because you see that like whitish outline So it's a resistive touch screen and then if you see this like a black bezel That's capacitive and then it has a separate you see there's like a tail. That's the Capacitive touchscreen. So a lot of options you're gonna see 4.3 inch 5 inch 7 inch Those are gonna be the most popular Three and a half sometimes you see 320 by 240, but I'll be honest when if I'm doing a 320 by 240 display I'll go with SPI. So let's go for I think 4.3 is kind of boring. Let's go for a 400 by 800 display And let's say it's in stock I can pick up something today and not in the marketplace. Okay, so it's 35 options Okay, there's one for that we stock a nice seven inch displays available and there's a few vendors You'll see it pop up a couple times. So DLC new Haven NHD Micro you can see again This is capacitive because there's got the it's got the secondary tail. That's the capacitive chip. I Want to go with let me see what's available here So let's see if I can get Something with you know, maybe capacitive touch and I think I want a five inch display Oh, I think Oops, I missed mis-selected something one moment This I wanted to look for okay. Well, you're doing yeah How do you even write drivers for these as one of the questions? Oh, that's a really good question So for these it's some other questions after the yeah, so I think I mis-selected the touch screen. Okay Don't forget you can always remove stuff at the bottom here For these displays the driver is almost always written by the Company that makes the chip because in a sense, there is no driver sometimes you initialize them Over I squirts your SPI just to get them like up and running But then once they're running you're literally just like slamming pixels to it as quickly as possible There is no I mean you can set the age sync polarity and v-sync and you can set that the timing data But there's no like driver in the same sense that a SPI display has a driver Okay, so actually I wanted to show a couple more things so one 4d systems has displays, but these have a UART connection, so they're not like a raw even though it looks like it's a raw display. They're not and then AZ and New Haven and DLC are the ones that have oh, yeah, this is the one. Sorry. It was resistive not capacitive um AZ displays has a lot of options available so check them out so they've got the one that I thought was really neat is They have a high brightness five inch IPS display So IPS displays, you know one thing that you can watch for is when you get if it doesn't say IPS like this one Doesn't have IPS in the title That means it's kind of visible only from like 20 to 40 degrees Whereas IPS you're gonna get like your modern smartphone where like you can look at it from like 80 85 degrees in every angle and so the actual display that I liked is This one not only is it IPS, but it's nice and bright 400 nits And you can compare different brightness like the backlight brightness will differ between them And then this one also there's another option. I think this is probably Maybe a slightly different brightness, but this one for 40 bucks is a really good deal because it's got IPS 800 by 40 pixels five inch display and it's got that parallel port for the parallel RGB clock for the ESP 32 s3 Note that it doesn't have that many IO. So even though it's just 24-bit color What you'll do is ground the bottom three or four pins of each Rg and b to get yourself 16 instead of 24-bit color. You'll have 16 bit color Just like kind of good enough for most uses And then those bottom bits you just ground them or you tie them together So you don't need as many GPIO. So just because the display has you know 24 bits of input you don't actually Write dated all 24 bits. You just ground the lower bits Write the upper bits and then you can you even technically dry these is like 8-bit color, right? You're only gonna get three, you know bits red three bits green two bits blue But because it's raw driven It doesn't there's no formatting of the data. Whatever gets written on every dot clock is what appears on the screen So I'm gonna make a board that takes the ESP 32 s3 and has the 40 pin connector plug it in But it's a standard connector and I can swap out different displays to make it a really nice big high portal So I'm gonna pick up one of these nice IPS five-inch displays And that's a great search