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I recently got the Adafruit gfx 2.8" display, which works fine.

It's quite obvious that it requires almost all of the pins on the UNO. However, I don't understand what are the 18 avaliable "soldier ports" are at the bottom of the Adafruit shield.

Can these ports be used with sensors, ie: push button, so you wouldn't need to plug anything else into the UNO board? What do these holes do? I'm unable to find out, as it doesn't seem to be a common shield, most Adafruit shields don't seem to have those ports.

If these ports do nothing, should I saw them off - save space?

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  • Can you provide a link to that exact product? I searched for it on Adafruit and found this one, but it doesn't have these solder points (its PCB is exactly as big as the screen itself). Maybe you have a different product
    – chrisl
    May 24 at 12:53
  • It somewhat resembles a standard Hitachi parallel port LCD interface. It has a few more connections. But that could be for the back light. I agree w/chrisl, you need to provide a link to the product. I may be wrong, but I think GFX is a generic term Adafruit uses when referring to their graphics library.
    – st2000
    May 24 at 13:44
  • @chrisl I've checked the model on my current one. HX8347 2.8" TFT LCD Shield
    – Cohen
    May 24 at 15:07
  • the holes are for soldering a pin header so that a ribbon cable can be plugged in
    – jsotola
    May 24 at 20:43
  • Am I able to remove it, if I don't need to plug in a ribbon cable?
    – Cohen
    May 24 at 23:11

1 Answer 1

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Those are an alternative way of connecting to the screen. Basically they mirror the connections to the "shield" pins.

To save costs the manufacturer will have made a PCB that can be used in multiple different ways just by soldering different connectors. In this case either as an Arduino shield or as a board on the end of a ribbon cable. You have the version with the Arduino shield pins soldered in.

They are of no use to you unless you should want to put the screen on the end of a ribbon cable. Can you remove them? Possibly, possibly not. It depends on how the PCB traces are routed. Cutting the board may cut important PCB traces that connect the screen to the Arduino shield pins.

Only close inspection of the board and understanding the routing of the traces will be able to tell you yes or no. If in doubt, though, no you don't want to be randomly cutting off chunks of the circuit.

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