Add a screen

Nine contacts of fifteen

The socket is a 15-way ribbon connector at 1.0 mm pitch. Contact 1 is ground and contact 2 is V(MCU), so the screen runs on the development board's own 3.3 V. Contacts 3 to 9 are the screen's signals, each joined to one header position from 20 to 26. Contacts 10 to 15 are named on the schematic and go nowhere.

On the Nano adapter the signal positions stop at the header, so a Nano cannot drive a screen on this socket at all.

Which screen

The kit's display examples are written for an ILI9488, 480 by 320: an ESP32-S3 sketch, a Pico driver and a Zero 2 W driver, each drawing three colour bars and a line of text. They drive that controller and no other.

Lonely Binary's six-screen SPI kit ends every panel in a 15-way ribbon too, and its library's default pins on an ESP32-S3 are exactly where the ESP32-S3 adapter puts the screen lines. But its panels use ST7735, ST7789 and ST7796 controllers, so they need that library, not the kit's ILI9488 examples. Check the controller printed on your panel before you choose code; screen size alone does not tell you.

Fit the ribbon

With every cable unplugged, lift the socket's latch, slide the ribbon in straight with its bare contacts facing the socket's contacts, and press the latch closed. Ribbons come with the contacts on the same side at both ends or on opposite sides, and the wrong kind reaches every contact on the wrong face. Do not fold it sharply.

Then run the colour test for your board from the repository's examples folder. Three distinct colour bars and readable text is a pass. A program that says it sent the picture proves only that it sent it: SPI does not report whether anything was listening.