ESP32-S3 1.8inch AMOLED Touch Display Development Board (No Battery)

Crisp, self-illuminating colour on a screen barely larger than a postage stamp, driven by a dual-core ESP32-S3 processor with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, motion sensing and audio already on board. It is a complete interactive device in a form factor you can build into almost anything.

Touch interfaces on microcontroller projects normally mean stacking a display shield onto a dev board, then wrestling with ribbon cables, IO conflicts and a power supply that was never designed for a battery. This board collapses that stack onto a single PCB: display, touch controller, IMU, RTC, audio codec, speaker, microphone and lithium charging circuitry all arrive wired and working.

The AMOLED panel is the standout. With no backlight to leak through, blacks are genuinely black at a 100000:1 contrast ratio, and unlit pixels draw no power at all, which matters when you are running from a small cell. The 178° viewing angle holds colour when the device is glanced at rather than stared at.

Development happens over USB-C with ESP-IDF or Arduino, and Waveshare's wiki carries demo code, schematics and datasheets. Note this is the standard -EN version, supplied without a lithium battery.

Features

• Detects orientation, gestures and step counts without extra parts, thanks to an onboard QMI8658 six-axis IMU (three-axis accelerometer plus three-axis gyroscope)

• Keeps time through a battery swap — the PCF85063 RTC runs from the main cell via the AXP2101, with reserved pads for a backup cell so the clock survives a change of battery

• It can speak and listen out of the box, using an ES8311 low-power mono codec with onboard speaker and microphone, supporting offline speech recognition and AI voice interaction via online model platforms

• Frees up IO by driving the CO5300 display over QSPI and the CST820 touch chip over I2C, consuming far fewer pins than a parallel interface

• Manages power properly with the AXP2101 IC, covering multiple voltage rails, lithium charging and discharge, and battery life optimisation

• Logs data and plays media straight from a microSD card, with the TF slot already on the board

• Expands to suit the project through reserved pads for 7 × GPIO, I2C, UART and USB at 1mm pitch, plus programmable PWR and BOOT buttons

• Goes straight into a build, arriving in a dedicated black case with a removable back cover

• Leaves room for a battery inside the case — the MX1.25 2P header accepts a 3.7V lithium cell (not included); a 3.85 × 24 × 28 mm cell is the recommended fit

Specifications

Resources

• Waveshare wiki

What's Included

• 1x ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.8-EN development board, with dedicated black case

• No lithium battery — this is the standard version; a 3.7V MX1.25 cell is sourced separately