Adafruit Shrinks the PiTFT, Releases 1.14-Inch Mini PiTFT Display for the Raspberry Pi
Tiny full-color in-plane switching display offers 240x135 resolution in a 1.14" diagonal, plus two tactile buttons.
Adafruit has refreshed its PiTFT family with a new model offering a considerably more compact panel than the original 3.5" variant: the Mini PiTFT, with an active display area measuring just 1.14" diagonal yet offering a full-color in-plane switching (IPS) display panel.
Designed to connect directly to the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header on any model of Raspberry Pi, the compact add-on is roughly the height of a US quarter. Communicating with the Raspberry Pi via the serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus, the 240x135-resolution IPS panel is claimed to offer around a fifteen frames per second (FPS) update rate, suitable for animations or simple video clips; the bundled kernel driver and Python library, meanwhile, allow it to switch between hosting the operating system's graphical or text user interfaces and arbitrary images and text.
The design of the Mini PiTFT includes two tactile switches for user input and leaves a chunk of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO header available for additional hardware, while a Qiiic/STEMMA QT connector on the underside of the board offers connectivity to STEMMA QT or other I2C hardware.
Despite its name, the Mini PiTFT isn't the smallest Raspberry Pi display Adafruit has ever designed: The earlier PiOLED used a monochrome organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display panel measuring just 1" diagonal, but with a somewhat restricted 128x32 resolution. The follow-up OLED Bonnet doubled the vertical resolution to a 128x64 total, but at the cost of a larger 1.3" diagonal. Neither offered the full-color capabilities of the Mini PiTFT, nor a resolution high enough for use as a terminal.
The Mini PiTFT is now available on Adafruit, and soon from the company's international distribution partners, priced at $14.95.