Sunflower Shield Adds a 3.5” Touchscreen to Your Arduino Project

Arduino boards have revolutionized what you can easily make at home, blinking LEDs, controlling motors, and countless other applications. This is all well and good, but what if you want to interact with your Arduino project with a touchscreen as with a smartphone or an advanced home automation console?

Up until now, that would have been difficult, but the Sunflower Shield from creator Paul Bartek (along with Olive, his apparent feline assistant) takes care of everything for you. It’s a 3.5” capacitive touchscreen that plugs into your Arduino board, and is available on Kickstarter at a $90 pledge level. It’s slightly larger than an Arduino Uno, and the four mounting holes on the sides mean that you can let your dev board “hang on” to the touchscreen that would be bolted to your enclosure.

The device is equipped with a micro SD slot for application storage, and can be used in a portrait or landscape orientation depending on your project needs. It also features accommodations for a k-type thermocouple for temperature readings and an audio output, and even ships with a probe and speaker for these applications. It looks like a very interesting shield, and with an estimated September 2018 delivery, you won’t have to wait too long to get one of these displays running on your project!