3.5" TFT Screen ILI9488 shows only white
Hello!
I am a rather beginner Arduino tinkerer and I recently bought a 3'5" TFT Screen ILI9488 4-wire SPI to play with bigger screens, I previously experimented successfully with SSD1306 screens.
Upon wiring the TFT screen to a ATMEGA2560 (Elegoo Mega) board, the screen fills with white.
When I upload a basic .ino example using the TFT built-in library from the Arduino IDE, the screen remains white and nothing seems to change.
I tried with the ArduinoGFX library (the TFT apparently extends from it), when I upload the clock example it works for a second and then turns all white again.
I am unsure of my wiring to the board, but by browsing on the web the SPI pins on the Elegoo board are between 50 and 53. From what I read online the screen should be powered with 3.3V as well as the LED screen pin. I tried to hook a potentiometer to the LED pin to modulate the lighting but that didn't made anything appear.
Could someone point me to the correct wiring schema/pinouts and best practices with this sort of screens?
Am I needing resistors or a level shifter for some pins?
In addition, for later experiments, can this screen be used with an ESP32-WROOM-32 board?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read, and if you do, thanks even more for trying to help an enthusiast beginner!
I am happy to provide more information if needed, I'm voluntarily not posting my wiring schema cause something must be wrong with it and I'm willing to start it from scratch with your pointers and info.

2 Replies
Most TFT displays like this one can only handle 3.3v logic, and you need a 5v to 3.3v logic shifter to run these displays from an arduino mega, but i'd recommend something like an ESP32 to run these kind of displays, not only because it already runs at 3.3v so you won't need a logic shifter, but it's also much more faster (more than 15x as fast), so you would get a much higher refresh rate (I got almost 90 FPS running a benchmark)
If you connected it to 5v input or logic then it's a good chance that it's fried.
I also recommend the TFT_eSPI library which is probably the most performant library for color LCD's
Are the soldered? Can you send a picture of the display?