LILYGO Unveils the T-Display S3 Long, for Fans of the Ultra-Wide Display Format
Despite its name, this smart color TFT display is considerably wider than it is long — and boasts Arduino IDE and PlatformIO compatibility.
Embedded electronics specialist LILYGO has launched a new development board based on the Espressif ESP32-S3 system-on-chip, and this one's for anyone who struggles to squeeze a user interface into a narrower layout: the ultra-wide T-Display S3 Long.
The T-Display S3 Long, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is built around the Espressif ESP32-S3R8 system-on-chip — giving it a 32-bit dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 processor running at up to 240MHz, vector extensions for improved performance of on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (AL and ML) workloads, 512kB of static RAM (SRAM) and a further 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) off-chip — plus 16MB of off-chip SPI flash storage.
The chip includes a radio support IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi in the 2.4GHz spectrum and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) with a data rate of up to 2Mb/s and support for Bluetooth Mesh networking. There's a USB Type-C On-The-Go (OTC) port, positioned at a 90-degree angle to the board to make it easier to mount in a front panel, with two Qwiic I2C headers and a 30-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header on a 1.27mm pin-pitch.
It's the display, though, that is the board's real selling point. The 3.4" panel is an ultra-wide 640×180 resolution color TFT, with an integrated SPI-connected capacitive touch layer. Compared to the company's previous T-Display models, it's the widest yet — and the whole board can be driven via an optional lithium-polymer (LiPo) battery, the company has confirmed.
The T-Display S3 Long is now available to order on the LILYGO store at $29.35; buyers, however, should heed the company's warning that the display is designed for use with a tweaked LVGL graphics library 8.3.0 only, and that upgrading to a newer version will likely result in unexpected behavior.
