Color LCD on the EV3

I was just brought to my attention on IRC that we haven’t been doing a very good job bragging on ourselves.

So, the long story is… when I first got my EV3, of course I took it apart. In the course of poking and prodding around, I cracked the LCD screen. So I began to look for a replacement. It seems that the LCD was custom manufactured for LEGO and there is nothing else with a 178x128 resolution. But Adafruit sells a 1.8” display that fits.

I’ve actually had a color LCD in one of my EV3s for almost a year now, but @rhempel just got around to modding his own and making a nice video about it.

Points of interest:

• The color display is 160x128 pixels vs.178x128 on the one that comes with the EV3.
• The display is automatically detected and will work with no modification to the ev3dev kernel.
• The backlight pulls about 20mA, which is comparable to the LEDs on the EV3. The backlight can also be dimmed.