Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-3.5

3.5" 320x480 IPS LCD (ST7796, SPI), FT6336 touch, ES8311 audio, TF card, AXP2101, PCF85063, QMI8658.

Building for it

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

At a glance

Display pins

ST7796 / ST7796S on SPI (4-wire serial): SPI clock 80 MHz, host SPI2_HOST, BGR colour order, inversion on.

Touch pins

FT6236 / FT6336U: I2C address 0x38, 400 kHz, shares the display bus.

Also on the board

• I2C (GPIO 8 / 7) - SDA GPIO 8, SCL GPIO 7
• TCA9554 I/O expander at 0x20, driving the lines marked above

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

Designing for it in LCD Wizard

• Choose Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-3.5 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 FT6236 / FT6336U is capacitive and needs no calibration. The firmware resets it and checks it answers on every boot.
• The backlight is dimmable: give a slider or a button a Set backlight action.
• With PSRAM the LVGL memory pool can live there, leaving internal RAM for everything else.
• Screens are designed for 320 x 480 px in either orientation, with LVGL 9 or LVGL 8.

The parts

ST7796 / ST7796S. The usual 4.0" 320x480 controller. Faster than ILI9488 over SPI (true RGB565).

FT6236 / FT6336U. Register-compatible with the FT6206. Very common on 2.8"-3.5" capacitive TFTs.

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

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.

• The vendor’s product page
• Vendor documentation
• Schematic (PDF)
• Waveshare demo code (pins read from here)

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.

Similar boards

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Next

• 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