LILYGO's New T-RGB ESP32-S3 Is the Company's First Round Touchscreen Display
With a 480×480 resolution, this detailed 2.1" color TFT includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity on a dual-core chip.
LILYGO has launched an integrated circular touchscreen display, built around Espressif's ESP32-S3 microcontroller and packing 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity: the LILYGO T-RGB.
"T-RGB is LILYGO's first circular touch display screen," the company writes of its latest board design, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "The main control chip adopts ESP32-S3R8 Tensilica Xtensa Dual Core LX7 Microprocessor, this chip supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 5."
The all-in-one display, which can be used as a standalone device, uses a Leadtek ST7701S-driven 2.1" TFT full-color LCD panel with circular layout — accepting, as all such displays do, a square image and cropping for display. In this case, the panel has a 480×480 pixel resolution with three-wire SPI and 18-bit RGB interfaces.
On the microcontroller side, the Espressif ESP32-S3 — one of the last chips to be launched by the company before its move to RISC-V-based processor cores — includes two Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz, vector instruction support for edge-AI work, 512kB of static RAM (SRAM), 16MB of additional pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), and 8MB of flash storage — expandable via a microSD card slot.
Elsewhere on the board is a Grove connector for external hardware, a USB Type-C connector for power and data, pads for a supplied but unsoldered battery cable — compatible lithium-polymer battery not included — and physical boot and reset buttons. The display itself, meanwhile, is touch-sensitive — making up for the board's lack of user-addressable physical buttons.
LILYGO's latest isn't the first self-contained microcontroller-equipped round display we've seen. Earlier this year Om Singh and SB Components unveiled the RoundyPi and RoundyFi, circular color displays built around a Raspberry Pi RP2040 and an Espressif ESP-12E respectively; in June, the company showed off variant, which mounted a round display on a Raspberry Pi Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) board while adding touch sensitivity.
The LILYGO T-RGB ESP32-S3 display is now available on the company's Tindie store, priced at $28.61.