ESP32 TouchDown

Name: ESP32 TouchDown
SKU: 22359
Price: 58.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.80 (5 reviews)

(5 Reviews)

An ESP32 with a 3.5" (480*320) TFT with Capacitive Touch

Designed by Dustin Watts in Netherlands

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An ESP32 with a 3.5" (480*320) TFT with Capacitive Touch

The ESP32 TouchDown ESP32 TouchDown is complete solution for anyone who wants/needs an ESP32 with capacitive touchscreen. It also has battery management onboard, a piezo speaker, and an SD card reade…

The ESP32 TouchDown

ESP32 TouchDown is complete solution for anyone who wants/needs an ESP32 with capacitive touchscreen. It also has battery management onboard, a piezo speaker, and an SD card reader. ESP32 TouchDown works out of the box with the Arduino IDE, providing you have installed the ESP32 Arduino Core. Pins that are not used by the peripherals onboard are broken out.

ESP32-WROOM-32D
ILI9488 3.5" (480*320) TFT screen in 4-wire SPI mode
FT62x6 Capacitive Touch Controller
APK2112 3.3V regulator (V1.1 -> AP7365)
MCP73831 battery management IC (V1.1 -> SD8016)
CP2102 USB-to-UART IC
USB-C connector
Piezo Speaker
microSD card holder
Battery voltage divider connected to GPIO35
Stemma / JST-PH I2C connector
Compact size: 100x57x15mm

FreeTouchDeck

The ESP32 TouchDown is designed with FreeTouchDeck (https://github.com/DustinWatts/FreeTouchDeck) in mind. The ESP32 TouchDown is the one stop solution to get a FreeTouchDeck up and running with capacitive touch without the need to buy separate modules. ESP32 TouchDown's are shipped to you with the most current release of FreeTouchDeck installed! Off course you can always re-flash it with your own firmware.

Write your own software

The ESP32 TouchDown can be used for more the FreeTouchDeck alone. It is a fully featured DevKit. In the Github repository you will find some examples to get you started:

An example for controlling Home Assistant (using their API)
An example of simple 4 by 3 matrix of buttons
An example of a phone-style keyboard
An example of how to get battery voltage information
And more...

Portability

The ESP32 TouchDown can run of a Li-Po battery. Combined with WiFi and BLE this makes the ESP32 TouchDown very portable. It uses an MCP73831 Charge Management Controller set to a charge current of 330mA. Charging is done through the USB-C port (using 5V). The on/off switch doesn't effect the battery charging. So even when the ESP2 TouchDown is off, you can still charge the battery. When the ESP32 TouchDown is plugged in to USB, it will use USB power over battery power and will switch to battery power when USB is disconnected, without interrupting the ESP32.

Note: Always use a protected cell!

3D printable Case

Although the bare board looks great (if I do say so myself), there is a design for a nice slick case available on the Github repository. There are a few different backs to support a case without battery, with battery, and a FreeTouchDeck style case. You can find the case here: https://github.com/DustinWatts/esp32-touchdown/tree/main/Case

If you like to design your own case, you can use the 3D model as a reference: https://github.com/DustinWatts/esp32-touchdown/tree/main/3D-model

TFT screen

ESP32 TouchDown uses a 3.5" TFT screen with a resolution of 480x320. The driver is an ILI9488. Pins used by the TFT screen are:

GPIO2 -> DC_RS
GPIO4 -> TFT_RESET
GPIO15 -> TFT_CS
GPIO18 -> SPI Clock
GPIO23 -> SDI (MOSI)

The TFT backlight anode (positive supply) is selectable via a jumper on the back. You can either power it directly from 3.3V or use GPIO32 (this will add dimming support). By default, the positive source is GPIO32. On V1.1 Of the board the jumpers that are used are with bridged pads. So if you want to change the backlight power source, you will have to cut the trace and add a blob of solder bridging the other pads. You can revert back to the original configuration by adding a blob of solder to the pads where the trace was cut.

Capacitive Touch

The capacitive touch controller is a FocalTech FT6236 (datasheet). The FT6236 uses I2C and has address 0X38. I made an Arduino IDE library available here: https://github.com/DustinWatts/FT6236.

Note: from batch 2 forward the FT6206 touch controller is used. This controller works the same and has the same I2C only a different Chip ID. The library above also support the FT6202.

Pins used by the FT62x6 are:

GPIO21 -> I2C data
GPIO22 -> I2C clock
GPIO27 -> IRQ

GPIO Breakout

The following GPIO's are broken out on the header:

GPIO 12
GPIO 13
GPIO 14
GPIO 16
GPIO 17
SCK (GPIO 18, used as SPI clock)
SDO (GPIO 19, used as SPI MOSI)
SDA (GPIO 21, used as I2C data)
SCL (GPIO 22, used as I2C clock)
SDI (GPIO 23, used as SPI MISO)
GPIO 33
GPIO 34 (note: INPUT only!)

Why is it so special?

ESP32 TouchDown comes ready to use. It includes all features that you would need additional modules for when using a development board. Besides that, ESP32 TouchDown is fully open source. All hardware designs can be found in the Github repository. ESP32 TouchDown is also OSHWA cerftified. You can find more information here: https://certification.oshwa.org/nl000004.html

Changelog ESP32 TouchDown

Rev 1.1

Changed Jumpers to pre-bridged pads (connected without a solder blob)
MCP73831 Battery management IC changed to Shouding SD8016 (pin compatible)
AP2112K Voltage regulator changed to AP7365 (pin compatible)

Batch information

Batch 6 (ETA June 12th 2022): Board version V1.1, PCB & assembly by PCBWay, final screen fitting, test, and uploading firmware by me.

Batch 5 (January 30th 2022): Board version V1.0, PCB by PCBWay, assembly, final screen fitting, test, and uploading firmware by me.

Batch 4 (October 3rd 2021): Board version V1.0, PCB & assembly by PCBWay, final screen fitting, test, and uploading firmware by me.

Batch 3 (May 9th 2021): Board version V1.0, PCB & assembly by PCBWay, final screen fitting, test, and uploading firmware by me.

Batch 2 (February 27th 2021): Board version V1.0, PCB & assembly by PCBWay, final screen fitting, test, and uploading firmware by me.

Batch 1 (February 16th 2021): Board version V1.0, PCB manufacturer: PCBWay, Parts source: LCSC, Hand assembled.

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Review Breakdown

Average Ratings

Product: (5.00)

Documentation: (5.00)

Shipping: (4.60)

Communication: (4.60)

Markus | June 23, 2022

Exactly what I expected

Fantastic product, very well put together and working flawlessly. Shipping was way faster than anticipated. I have only received it today, so I cannot speak for every single feature, but paired with a "non-official" firmware (openHASP) it does exactly what I wanted it to do!
You do need to tinker a bit to get it to where you want it to be, but thats also the beauty of it! Absolute recommendation :-)

Simon | June 22, 2022

Fantastic

Great product very well made and well presented with good speedy delivery and excellent packaging.
This is the 2nd Touchdown I've purchased - a fantastic base for all sorts of ESP32 projects. I'm going to be making a retro games console with this one :)

Marcelo | July 20, 2021

Awesome product. Nice to buy quality stuff like this!

From the presentation (closed box, super protected for shipping), to the product itself which is very high quality, it is a great product.
Documentation seems great so far. The communication with the seller is 15/10. Since I live in Argentina and the regular shipping could get lost, the seller went off his way to get me a shipping with tracking and didn't even ask to get reimbursed for this. Awesome product and creator!

Brian | May 16, 2021

quick shipping to Canada

I received the product 10 days after it was shipped (to Nova Scotia Canada). It was packed in a a large box and was well padded so there could be no chance of damage (unlike Banggood!). I did not order the pre-loaded OpenDeck firmware, but it comes flashed with a simple program that shows you that MCU, display and touchscreen are working. This is a well-thought-out design and I am looking forward to using it.

Christoffer | May 2, 2021

Fantastic product

I was lucky enough to snag the first run of this product. Even though that batch is hand assembled it has worked flawlessly for about 2 months. I use one daily for shortcuts when using video conferencing software for work. The seller, Dustin, has been phenomenally supportive through the Discord channels and it's obvious this is a passionate person releasing a passion project. Their troubleshooting skills are amazing, even for obscure causes. Dustin knows his product and possible problems with it inside and out! It's hard to believe this is a young product with relatively few users, yet! I ran into a problem because I mistakenly used the wrong case on my WiFi SSID. It took a while for us to figure out together, but after that more functionality has been put into the software to make setting up WiFi much easier.

The FreeTouchDeck software isn't necessarily under review here, but I'll mention it anyway incase you are mostly intending to use it like me, as a beautiful extra capacitive touch button keyboard. It works nicely but isn't really extensible to more menus or buttons than the one main menu with 5 submenus. The fact that so much functionality like webserver, button UI, BLE Bluetooth keyboard, WiFi-config, USB-C, battery support, sleep mode, brightness control and more is built in is QUITE amazing considering it all runs on the ESP32 processor. The software is of course open source so you can modify or use it as a base for your own custom implementation.

I picked the cheaper shipping option (within EU) and unfortunately regretted it later because it was quite slow. I believe it took around three weeks within the northern half of Europe. But these are difficult times for shipping with pandemic restrictions, so no guarantees were made or broken. Would pick the faster option next time to try it out.