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Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-4.3

4.3" 800x480 RGB panel with GT911 touch, a TF card slot, RS485, CAN and a sensor input. An I/O expander handles the reset lines.

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Building for it

A project is made for one toolchain, picked when you start it. All four can drive this board:

Toolchain
Arduino (C++)	Every board, every widget and every peripheral here. The most control, and the most to set up. Start a project
MicroPython	Change a screen by editing a file on the board. No compiler once it is flashed. Start a project
ESPHome	No compiler to install, and the panel can join Home Assistant as real entities. Start a project
ESP-IDF (C)	Espressif's own framework: esp_lcd, the component registry and idf.py, with nothing of Arduino in it. Start a project

At a glance

Part	Detail
Maker	Waveshare
MCU	ESP32-S3 Xtensa LX7 dual-core @ 240 MHz, 512 KB SRAM (+ 2-16 MB PSRAM on most modules)
Display	Generic RGB565 panel, 800 x 480 px, RGB565 parallel (DPI), 16-bit colour
Touch	Goodix GT911 (capacitive, I2C)
Backlight	CH422G pin 2, on and off
Memory	16 MB flash, 8 MB octal PSRAM (N16R8)
Graphics library	GFX Library for Arduino

Display pins

Generic RGB565 panel on RGB565 parallel (DPI): RGB colour order, inversion off.

Signal	Pin
DE	GPIO 5
VSYNC	GPIO 3
HSYNC	GPIO 46
PCLK	GPIO 7
R0 - R4	GPIO 1, 2, 42, 41, 40
G0 - G5	GPIO 39, 0, 45, 48, 47, 21
B0 - B4	GPIO 14, 38, 18, 17, 10
RESET	CH422G pin 3
Backlight	CH422G pin 2

Touch pins

GT911: I2C address 0x5D, 400 kHz.

Signal	Pin
SDA	GPIO 8
SCL	GPIO 9
INT / IRQ	GPIO 4
RESET	CH422G pin 1

Also on the board

I2C0 (touch, CH422G, header) - SDA GPIO 8, SCL GPIO 9
SPI (TF card) - SCK GPIO 12, MOSI GPIO 11, MISO GPIO 13
CH422G I/O expander at 0x24, driving the lines marked above
SDCard - SD card, on SPI (TF card), CS CH422G pin 4
The TF card slot. Its CS is EXIO4 of the CH422G rather than a GPIO, so the card is selected once and stays selected, and has this SPI bus to itself.
RS485 - RS485 / Modbus RTU, TX GPIO 16, RX GPIO 15
The A and B terminals. The transceiver turns itself round, so there is no direction pin - and the pins are the other way about from Waveshare's table, which names them from the transceiver's side.
CanBus - CAN bus / OBD-II, TX GPIO 20, RX GPIO 19, EN CH422G pin 5 (arrives switched off in a new design)
The CAN H and L terminals. It arrives switched off because GPIO 19 and 20 are also the USB port: switching this on raises EXIO5, which hands them to the CAN transceiver and takes the USB port away until the board is next powered up with it off. The UART port still flashes and logs.
Sensor AD - analog input on GPIO 6

The preset adds these to the Hardware tab with the board, so a sensor can go straight onto the connector.

Guide: Waveshare 4.3 and 7 inch boards: card slot, RS485, CAN and sensor input - each of these parts step by step, with what to wire, what to press and what to check when it does not answer.

Check your revision. Touch reset (EXIO1), backlight enable (EXIO2), panel reset (EXIO3), the TF card's CS (EXIO4) and the USB / CAN switch (EXIO5) sit on a CH422G expander on the I2C bus at GPIO 8/9; the generated code brings the expander up first and drives them. The TF card is on SPI (MOSI 11, SCK 12, MISO 13) and must be the only thing on it: its CS cannot be toggled through the expander, so the card is selected once and stays selected. RS485 is an SP3485 that turns itself round - the chip sends on GPIO 16 and receives on GPIO 15, which is the other way about from Waveshare's pin table (it names the two from the transceiver's side; their own demo has RX 15, TX 16). GPIO 19 and 20 are the USB port until EXIO5 is raised, which hands them to the CAN transceiver (TX 20, RX 19): the CAN bus arrives switched off, and switching it on takes the USB port away - the expander keeps its lines through a reset, so flash through the UART port, or power the board off and on. The Sensor AD terminal is GPIO 6, 0 to about 3.1 V. The serial log is the UART port (GPIO 43/44).

Designing for it in LCD Wizard

Choose Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-4.3 on the Hardware tab (or use the button above) and every pin on this page is filled in. The export writes the sketch, lcd_pins.h, the GFX Library for Arduino configuration, lv_conf.h and platformio.ini - a project that builds for this board as it comes.
The GT911 is capacitive and needs no calibration. The firmware resets it and checks it answers on every boot.
The backlight switches on and off; it is not dimmable from the firmware.
An RGB panel keeps its frame buffer in PSRAM, which this board has.
Screens are designed for 800 x 480 px in either orientation, with LVGL 9 or LVGL 8.

The parts

Generic RGB565 panel. Raw RGB glass with no controller IC. All timing comes from the MCU.

GT911. The address is selected by the INT pin level during reset, so wire INT and RST if you can.

ESP32-S3. The only common Arduino target with a hardware RGB565 LCD peripheral. PSRAM is effectively required for RGB panels.

GFX Library for Arduino. Moshi Liu's library. Best QSPI/AMOLED and RGB coverage. Configured in code.

The pinout on one page

Every pin above, laid out to print and keep beside the bench. Generated from this preset, so it says exactly what the designer writes into lcd_pins.h.

Download the pinout (PNG)Open it as SVG

The same pins as data - board.json and pins.csv - are in the open pinout dataset on GitHub, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

From the people who made it

The board’s own documentation. Pinouts on vendor pages do sometimes disagree with the hardware in front of you - where this page and that one differ, trust your board and tell us.

Designs for this board

Nobody has published a design for this board yet. Publish yours from the designer and it appears here and in the gallery.

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Quick start - from an empty screen to firmware on the board
Boards and displays - presets, controllers, pins and touch in the designer
Flashing and configuration - PlatformIO, the Arduino IDE and first-boot checks
Troubleshooting - a white screen, mirrored image or touch that misses