7-inch ESP32-S3 touchscreen display exposes RS485, CAN Bus, I2C, UART, and analog sensor interfaces

Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7 is an ESP32-S3 powered WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5 LE 7-inch touchscreen display with plenty of expansion interfaces such as RS485, CAN Bus, I2C, UART, and Analog input that can be used to develop various HMI applications

We’ve written about many ESP32 boards with displays, but most are small displays under 3-inch, and larger displays are more of a rarity except for ESP32 e-Paper displays such as the Inkplate 10 or LILYGO 7.5-inch e-Paper display. Most are based on ESP32-S3 since it comes with an RGB LCD interface, and the only other 7-inch ESP32-S3 touchscreen display we’ve looked into is the Elecrow 7.0-inch display with specifications similar to the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7, but fewer I/O headers.

Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7:

Wireless module – ESP32-S3-WROOM-1
- MCU – ESP32-S3N8R8 dual-core Tensilica LX7 up to 240 MHz with 512KB SRAM, 8MB PSRAM, 8MB flash
- Wireless – 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5
- PCB antenna
Storage – MicroSD card slot
Display – 7-inch capacitive touch screen with 800×480 resolution, 65K colors, 154.88×86.72 mm viewing area
USB
- 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming
- 1x USB Type-C UART port (UART1) via CH343P USB to TTL chip
Expansion
- UART connector (UART2)
- Analog sensor connector
- CAN bus connector
- I2C connector with 3.3V/5V selected by resistor
- RS485 connector with 120-ohm termination resistors connected via jumpers
Misc
- BOOT and Reset buttons
- UART selection switch
- Power, Charging, and Done (full charge) LEDs
Power Supply
- 5V via USB-C port
- 2-pin connector for 3.7V battery
Dimensions – 193 x 110.8 mm

Waveshare says the display can be programmed with MicroPython, the Arduino IDE, or the ESP-IDF framework but the wiki only really provides instructions and code samples for the latter two. One of those is the LVGL benchmark reaching 26 FPS on a single core using the ESP-IDF v5.3, and the company claims it corresponds to an interface frame rate of 41 FPS with PCLK set to 21 MHz. I’m not quite sure how the math works here, but this document is supposed to provide some pointers concerning LVGL performance optimization.

Waveshare sells the ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7 wireless touchscreen display on Amazon for $49.99, on Aliexpress for $41.32 plus about $5 for shipping (in my case to Thailand), and on their online store for $36.99 plus shipping.There are also other sizes for Waveshare ESP32-S3 touchscreen displays, as we’ve just written about the watch-sized 1.69-inch model with features such as IMU and RTC, and you’ll also find a 4.3-inch variant among others.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.