Adafruit 1.8" Colour Display Shield for Arduino The Arduino 802 is a compact shield which provides a simple way to add both a small screen, micro-SD card slot and a joystick to your Arduino project. The Arduino 802 module is perfect for tinkering and prototyping your ideas.
What is an Arduino Shield?
Arduino shields are add-on boards which sit directly on top of an Arduino board, for example, the Arduino UNO. These Arduino-compatible expansion boards enable to add new functionality to your Arduino board.

The Display:
This Arduino shield features a 1.8" display with 128 x 160 colour pixels. It is a true TFT display offering 18-bit colour with 262144 shades. This means that the Arduino 802 display is colourful with a high refresh rate. This display comes with a white LED backlight.

How do I control it?
The 802 module features a 5-way navigation switch (left, right, up, down, select) connected to Analogue 5 and when using the micro-SD card you will use digital pins 4 and 12. There is also 3 buttons marked A, B and C.
The display uses 4 pins to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, so you can use it without using all the memory or pins.

What is the microSD for?
The Arduino 802 comes with a microSD slot which enables you to loads full-colour bitmaps. You will need a FAT16 or FAT32 formatted microSD card for this (not included).

Which Arduino boards are compatible?
This shield works best with the Arduino UNO and compatible boards. The shield has an ultra-low-dropout 3.3 V regulator and a 3/5 V level shifter so it is safe to use with both 3.3 V and 5 V Arduino boards.
The Arduino 802 shield comes assembled. However, you will need to solder the header onto the shield.

How big is it?
The Arduino 802 measures 68.5 x 53 x 11.8 mm / 2.7 x 2.1 x 0.5 mm. It weighs 22g / 8oz.

Looking for inspiration?
On the Adafruit.com website, there is an open source graphics library that can draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text and bitmaps as well as example code and a wiring tutorial. The code is written for Arduino but it can be ported to another microcontroller.

Note: Display current draw is mostly based on the backlight, with full backlight the current draw is ∼100mA, this does not include the SD Card. SD cards can draw 20-100mA based on read/write. Measure current draw in circuit to get precise numbers.