7.0″ 40-pin TFT Display – 800×480 without Touchscreen Adafruit

This 7.0″ TFT screen has lots of pixels, 800×480 to be exact, and an LED backlight. Its great for when you need a lot of space for graphics. These screens are commonly seen in consumer electronics, such as miniature TV’s, GPS’s, handheld games car displays, etc. A 40-pin connector has 8 red, 8 green, and 8 blue parallel pins, for 24 bit color capability.

This version does not have touchscreen attached. It’s exactly the same TFT display as PID 2354 but without the resistive touch panel so it is a little less expensive.

This is a “raw pixel-dot-clock” display and does not have an SPI/parallel type controller or any kind of RAM. The display is supposed to be constantly refreshed, at 60Hz, with a pixel clock, V sync, H sync, etc. There are some high end processors such as that used in the BeagleBone that can natively support such RGB TTL displays. However, it is extremely rare for a small microcontroller to support it, as you need dedicated hardware or a very fast processor such as an FPGA. Not only that, but the backlight requires a 125-150mA constant-current mode boost converter that can go as high as 9V instead of our other small displays that can run the backlight off of 5V

For that reason, we are carrying it as a companion to the Adafruit RA8875 driver board in the store, which is a chip that can handle the huge video RAM and timing requirements, all in the background. That’s the best way to interface this display to just about any microcontroller (including Arduino & friends) If you want to control with from an HDMI or DVI output, check out our TFP401 driver board.