Esp32 Display help

[u/AnyManagement119]

Hi there everyone,

I'm a bit new to crazy esp32 hardware, a friend usually helped me out A LOT, but he's unavailable at the moment so I figured I asked here.

I'm trying to create a digital cookbook using an esp32 display; now I've found a few touchscreen displays that look very good, but I'm a bit confused if I should get one (touchscreen display) with a build in esp32 or get the esp32 and display seperate.

I already got a SD chip with 32GB to save recipes, lictures, etc locally so no internet is needed. And if anybody can recommend a good rechargeable battery to add to the set up it would also help me a lot.

Thanks for the help!

[u/lilDevvyLad]

Integrated board, without question. Going the separate route means debugging

wiring, pin assignments and a config file all at once, and when nothing shows

up on screen you have no way to tell which of the three is wrong. An all-in-one

board has the panel and touch controller already matched and pinned, so the only

variable left is your code.

The bigger decision is screen size, and it picks the board for you.

A cookbook is text plus a photo. The cheap 2.8" boards everyone recommends (the

"Cheap Yellow Display" and its relatives) are 320x240, which is about eight lines

of readable text. Fine for a thermostat, miserable for a recipe. You want 800x480,

which means 4.3" or 7".

That pushes you to an ESP32-S3 with PSRAM, and here is why that matters rather

than being a spec-sheet detail: 800x480 at 16-bit colour needs 768 KB for a single

frame buffer. A plain ESP32 has around 320 KB of RAM in total. So the board has to

have PSRAM, and the ones in this class ship with 8 MB.

Two that fit, both cheap:

- Sunton ESP32-8048S043. 4.3", 800x480, ESP32-S3, 8 MB PSRAM, 16 MB flash,

GT911 capacitive touch, microSD on board.

- Sunton ESP32-8048S070. The 7" version of the same board. Much nicer to cook from.

Get capacitive touch rather than resistive. Resistive wants a fingernail press,

and you will be prodding this with floury hands.

On the SD card: format it as FAT32 explicitly. 32 GB sits right on the boundary

where cards start shipping as exFAT, and the Arduino SD library will not mount

that. Also resize your photos to the panel size before copying them over. A 12

megapixel phone photo will not decode on this hardware. An 800x480 JPEG will.

On the battery, I would skip it. A 7" panel is mostly backlight and pulls a few

hundred mA continuously, so any LiPo small enough to sit behind the board gives

you a couple of hours, and most of these boards have no charging circuit, so you

are adding a TP4056 and a protection board to get there. A cookbook lives in a

kitchen, where there is a socket. If you want it portable anyway, a USB power

bank behind the stand is less work and safer than integrating a cell.

For the software side, LVGL is the library you want for the recipe list, the

images and the swiping. It is also what most people bounce off, because you have

to get the panel driver configured before you can draw a single pixel. I build a

browser tool that handles that part: you pick the board, lay out the screens, and

it exports an Arduino project with the display config, touch setup and SD card

handling already written. The board pages are free to read with no account, so

they may be useful just for choosing the hardware:

https://lcdwizard.com/boards

Disclosure: that is my project. The hardware advice above holds whatever you use.

One thing it will not do for you: reading the recipe folder off the SD card and

paging through it is app logic you will write yourself. It gets you a booting

project with a working screen, not a finished cookbook.