arduino lcd display power consumption quotation

But the amount of heat and how much power it can supply before it fails depends on the overall current draw and the voltage being supplied to the barrel connector.

If you use the 5v USB connector for your power, you can supply quite a bit more current to attached devices with no regulator heat issues as it by passes the on board regulator.

Some of the 3rd party Arduino clones use a better design and do not have as much as an overheating issue when using a external power supply to power the Arduino clone board.

Verify your loads using spec/datasheets and/or a meter. If the loads are too high, try to use the 5v USB for the Arduino board and as else much as you can, then bring in the external power (potentially even a different voltage) for the bigger stuff like motors that can be isolated using transistors, relays, etc...

We have much merriment here when people refer to a "9v battery" if they mean the common "PP3" or "smoke alarm battery". It will not run an Arduino for very long at all.

You do not want to power the Arduino by "Vin" or the "barrel jack". The on-board regulator is not very capable and you are just wasting four volts out of nine. Four Ni-Mh "AA" cells in a holder would be far more appropriate, connected to the "5V" pin.

Now the backlight on the LCD draws about 20 mA (in most cases) while the LCD itself draws less than 1 mA. It will in fact draw only half of that if you correct a common mistake and remove the connection from the contrast potentiometer to 5 V, leaving it only connected to pin 3 and ground.

The Arduino itself however consumes as much or more power than the backlight, particularly a UNO or Nano etc. with a USB to serial chip. The Pro Mini does not have this USB to serial chip (you have to connect an adapter to program it) so is much better in this respect.

The logger runs off battery power in a remote location for days on end, I need the LCD to be on when I check the unit every week, but for the rest of the time I want the LCD to be off just to save power.

I had thought that I could simply add an on/off switch to the 5v supply to the LCD (the Vdd line on the circuit diagram). For some reason, this doesn"t seem to work as expected. With the LCD on I can power up the data logger and it will happily boot up and start logging with the LCD working fine. If I flick the switch the LCD will turn off as expected and the logger will continue logging (I know this because the file it logs to continues to grow correctly)

The problem comes when I attempt to switch the LCD back on again, I flick the switch but the LCD remains blank, the only way I can turn the screen on again is to cycle the power for the whole unit, the logger and screen together. I seems I can"t just turn the screen on and off on it"s own.

Let me start with where I started, I am working on a project involving and arduino and a display that I want to display a new quote once a day for a month, before needing to have new quotes loaded. I decided, because I wanted to run it off of battery power to try and use an e-paper display, I originally purchased a pervasive display 4.41 inch display along with an Arduino Uno. I was able to get the two talking over SPI, I was also able to send basic commands like refreshing the display, however, I soon realized that the display require 15K bytes of image data to be sent each time I want to load new image data. I decided to move up to and Arduino Due, which I was bale to get talking again, however, it stopped working, and I was have intermittent problems, to the point where I reconnected the Uno and even previous code I had written would not work as I expected. I can only assume I cooked something on the pervasive display timing controller? If anyone has a suggestion regarding this I would appreciate it.

I have now decided to try going with a regular LCD display, I am thinking about the 20X4 character display for simplicity"s sake. The next question would be how can someone who does not want to go into the code to change the quotes change them, I am assuming I would need to incorporate some sort of SD card interface.

Then i saw those "A" and "K" one the right side, guess what, I used "A" for 3.3V and "K" for Ground, the back light was on and everything was working fine(except the lost pixels. I really don"t know what cause the LCD to malfunction, I just wont try to power the back light through pins 15-16.

Of course pins 15 and 16 for the backlight have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the LCD panel and its operation. What voltage are you powering it with?

In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to set up an LCD on an Arduino and show you all the different ways you can program it. I’ll show you how to print text, scroll text, make custom characters, blink text, and position text. They’re great for any project that outputs data, and they can make your project a lot more interesting and interactive.

The display I’m using is a 16×2 LCD display that I bought for about $5. You may be wondering why it’s called a 16×2 LCD. The part 16×2 means that the LCD has 2 lines, and can display 16 characters per line. Therefore, a 16×2 LCD screen can display up to 32 characters at once. It is possible to display more than 32 characters with scrolling though.

The code in this article is written for LCD’s that use the standard Hitachi HD44780 driver. If your LCD has 16 pins, then it probably has the Hitachi HD44780 driver. These displays can be wired in either 4 bit mode or 8 bit mode. Wiring the LCD in 4 bit mode is usually preferred since it uses four less wires than 8 bit mode. In practice, there isn’t a noticeable difference in performance between the two modes. In this tutorial, I’ll connect the LCD in 4 bit mode.

Here’s a diagram of the pins on the LCD I’m using. The connections from each pin to the Arduino will be the same, but your pins might be arranged differently on the LCD. Be sure to check the datasheet or look for labels on your particular LCD:

Also, you might need to solder a 16 pin header to your LCD before connecting it to a breadboard. Follow the diagram below to wire the LCD to your Arduino:

All of the code below uses the LiquidCrystal library that comes pre-installed with the Arduino IDE. A library is a set of functions that can be easily added to a program in an abbreviated format.

In order to use a library, it needs be included in the program. Line 1 in the code below does this with the command #include . When you include a library in a program, all of the code in the library gets uploaded to the Arduino along with the code for your program.

Now we’re ready to get into the programming! I’ll go over more interesting things you can do in a moment, but for now lets just run a simple test program. This program will print “hello, world!” to the screen. Enter this code into the Arduino IDE and upload it to the board:

There are 19 different functions in the LiquidCrystal library available for us to use. These functions do things like change the position of the text, move text across the screen, or make the display turn on or off. What follows is a short description of each function, and how to use it in a program.

TheLiquidCrystal() function sets the pins the Arduino uses to connect to the LCD. You can use any of the Arduino’s digital pins to control the LCD. Just put the Arduino pin numbers inside the parentheses in this order:

This function sets the dimensions of the LCD. It needs to be placed before any other LiquidCrystal function in the void setup() section of the program. The number of rows and columns are specified as lcd.begin(columns, rows). For a 16×2 LCD, you would use lcd.begin(16, 2), and for a 20×4 LCD you would use lcd.begin(20, 4).

This function clears any text or data already displayed on the LCD. If you use lcd.clear() with lcd.print() and the delay() function in the void loop() section, you can make a simple blinking text program:

Similar, but more useful than lcd.home() is lcd.setCursor(). This function places the cursor (and any printed text) at any position on the screen. It can be used in the void setup() or void loop() section of your program.

The cursor position is defined with lcd.setCursor(column, row). The column and row coordinates start from zero (0-15 and 0-1 respectively). For example, using lcd.setCursor(2, 1) in the void setup() section of the “hello, world!” program above prints “hello, world!” to the lower line and shifts it to the right two spaces:

You can use this function to write different types of data to the LCD, for example the reading from a temperature sensor, or the coordinates from a GPS module. You can also use it to print custom characters that you create yourself (more on this below). Use lcd.write() in the void setup() or void loop() section of your program.

The function lcd.noCursor() turns the cursor off. lcd.cursor() and lcd.noCursor() can be used together in the void loop() section to make a blinking cursor similar to what you see in many text input fields:

Cursors can be placed anywhere on the screen with the lcd.setCursor() function. This code places a blinking cursor directly below the exclamation point in “hello, world!”:

This function creates a block style cursor that blinks on and off at approximately 500 milliseconds per cycle. Use it in the void loop() section. The function lcd.noBlink() disables the blinking block cursor.

This function turns on any text or cursors that have been printed to the LCD screen. The function lcd.noDisplay() turns off any text or cursors printed to the LCD, without clearing it from the LCD’s memory.

This function takes anything printed to the LCD and moves it to the left. It should be used in the void loop() section with a delay command following it. The function will move the text 40 spaces to the left before it loops back to the first character. This code moves the “hello, world!” text to the left, at a rate of one second per character:

Like the lcd.scrollDisplay() functions, the text can be up to 40 characters in length before repeating. At first glance, this function seems less useful than the lcd.scrollDisplay() functions, but it can be very useful for creating animations with custom characters.

lcd.noAutoscroll() turns the lcd.autoscroll() function off. Use this function before or after lcd.autoscroll() in the void loop() section to create sequences of scrolling text or animations.

This function sets the direction that text is printed to the screen. The default mode is from left to right using the command lcd.leftToRight(), but you may find some cases where it’s useful to output text in the reverse direction:

This code prints the “hello, world!” text as “!dlrow ,olleh”. Unless you specify the placement of the cursor with lcd.setCursor(), the text will print from the (0, 1) position and only the first character of the string will be visible.

This command allows you to create your own custom characters. Each character of a 16×2 LCD has a 5 pixel width and an 8 pixel height. Up to 8 different custom characters can be defined in a single program. To design your own characters, you’ll need to make a binary matrix of your custom character from an LCD character generator or map it yourself. This code creates a degree symbol (°):

This tutorial includes everything you need to know about controlling a character LCD with Arduino. I have included a wiring diagram and many example codes. These displays are great for displaying sensor data or text and they are also fairly cheap.

The first part of this article covers the basics of displaying text and numbers. In the second half, I will go into more detail on how to display custom characters and how you can use the other functions of the LiquidCrystal Arduino library.

As you will see, you need quite a lot of connections to control these displays. I therefore like to use them with an I2C interface module mounted on the back. With this I2C module, you only need two connections to control the LCD. Check out the tutorial below if you want to use an I2C module as well:

These LCDs are available in many different sizes (16×2 1602, 20×4 2004, 16×1 etc.), but they all use the same HD44780 parallel interface LCD controller chip from Hitachi. This means you can easily swap them. You will only need to change the size specifications in your Arduino code.

For more information, you can check out the datasheets below. The 16×2 and 20×4 datasheets include the dimensions of the LCD and in the HD44780 datasheet you can find more information about the Hitachi LCD driver.

Most LCDs have a built-in series resistor for the LED backlight. You should find it on the back of the LCD connected to pin 15 (Anode). If your display doesn’t include a resistor, you will need to add one between 5 V and pin 15. It should be safe to use a 220Ω resistor, but this value might make your display a bit dim. You can check the datasheet for the maximum current rating of the backlight and use this to select an appropriate resistor value.

After you have wired up the LCD, you will need to adjust the contrast of the display. This is done by turning the 10 kΩ potentiometer clockwise or counterclockwise.

Plug in the USB connector of the Arduino to power the LCD. You should see the backlight light up. Now rotate the potentiometer until one (16×2 LCD) or 2 rows (20×4 LCD) of rectangles appear.

In order to control the LCD and display characters, you will need to add a few extra connections. Check the wiring diagram below and the pinout table from the introduction of this article.

We will be using the LCD in 4-bit mode, this means you don’t need to connect anything to D0-D3. The R/W pin is connected to ground, this will pull the pin LOW and set the LCD to WRITE mode.

To control the LCD we will be using the LiquidCrystal library. This library should come pre-installed with the Arduino IDE. You can find it by going to Sketch > Include Library > LiquidCrystal.

The example code below shows you how to display a message on the LCD. Next, I will show you how the code works and how you can use the other functions of the LiquidCrystal library.

After including the library, the next step is to create a new instance of the LiquidCrystal class. The is done with the function LiquidCrystal(rs, enable, d4, d5, d6, d7). As parameters we use the Arduino pins to which we connected the display. Note that we have called the display ‘lcd’. You can give it a different name if you want like ‘menu_display’. You will need to change ‘lcd’ to the new name in the rest of the sketch.

In the loop() the cursor is set to the third column and first row of the LCD with lcd.setCursor(2,0). Note that counting starts at 0, and the first argument specifies the column. If you do not specify the cursor position, the text will be printed at the default home position (0,0) if the display is empty, or behind the last printed character.

Next, the string ‘Hello World!’ is printed with lcd.print("Hello World!"). Note that you need to place quotation marks (” “) around the text. When you want to print numbers or variables, no quotation marks are necessary.

The LiquidCrystal Arduino library has many other built-in functions which you might find useful. You can find an overview of them below with explanation and some code snippets.

Clears the LCD screen and positions the cursor in the upper-left corner (first row and first column) of the display. You can use this function to display different words in a loop.

This function turns off any text or cursors printed to the LCD. The text/data is not cleared from the LCD memory. This means it will be shown again when the function display() is called.

Scrolls the contents of the display (text and cursor) one space to the left. You can use this function in the loop section of the code in combination with delay(500), to create a scrolling text animation.

This function turns on automatic scrolling of the LCD. This causes each character output to the display to push previous characters over by one space. If the current text direction is left-to-right (the default), the display scrolls to the left; if the current direction is right-to-left, the display scrolls to the right. This has the effect of outputting each new character to the same location on the LCD.

The following example sketch enables automatic scrolling and prints the character 0 to 9 at the position (16,0) of the LCD. Change this to (20,0) for a 20×4 LCD.

With the function createChar() it is possible to create and display custom characters on the LCD. This is especially useful if you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.

Technical info: LCDs that are based on the Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller have two types of memories: CGROM and CGRAM (Character Generator ROM and RAM). CGROM generates all the 5 x 8 dot character patterns from the standard 8-bit character codes. CGRAM can generate user-defined character patterns.

/* Example sketch to create and display custom characters on character LCD with Arduino and LiquidCrystal library. For more info see www.www.makerguides.com */

After including the library and creating the LCD object, the custom character arrays are defined. Each array consists of 8 bytes, 1 byte for each row. In this example 8 custom characters are created.

In this article I have shown you how to use an alphanumeric LCD with Arduino. I hope you found it useful and informative. If you did, please share it with a friend that also likes electronics and making things!

I would love to know what projects you plan on building (or have already built) with these LCDs. If you have any questions, suggestions, or if you think that things are missing in this tutorial, please leave a comment down below.

Since my study was not always at the best temperature, I decided it would be useful to display the ambient temperature on my desk. The cost of a sensor that provided humidity, in addition to temperature, was not prohibitive; therefore that was what was chosen.

Both the DHT11 and DHT22 sensors I considered provide temperature results in Centigrade. Fortunately it is an easy conversion to Fahrenheit (the format used in the USA, which is my location) . The sketch below displays temperature in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade, so it is applicable to whatever region of the world you are located in.

There are many published examples on-line showing how to display humidity and temperature using an Arduino UNO, some include displaying the results on an LCD. In this Instructable, we will also display the results on an LCD, but with the addition of power conservation that allows the LCD backlight to be toggled on and off when the display is not needed. This ability was meaningful to me, as I prefer to be able to turn the display off when I am not in the study.

If you are using a “wall wart” extra power consumption may not be of overwhelming importance, but if you are powering the display from a battery it likely is, as reduced power consumption will extend a battery’s life.

I considered both the DHT22 and the DTH11/12 sensors, and settled on the DHT22, although slightly more expensive. The DHT11 can often be purchased for less than $2, while the DHT22 is often found for less than $5. If purchased directly from China, the cost can be even less. If I only wanted to display temperature, I could have used instead the TMP36 sensor and realized some savings, and indeed this is how I built an earlier DIY of mine. However, I decided to include a humidity display in this project.

The DHT11/22 sensors can easily be substituted for each other. Depending on cost constraints, if any, either sensor can be chosen. They both come in similar 4-pin packages that are interchangeable, and as we will see shortly only 3 of the 4 pins on either package will be needed to build the desktop humidity and temperature display presented here. Although only three pins are needed for use, the four pins provide additional stability when these DHT sensors are placed/mounted on a breadboard.

In the previous tutorial I showed how to build a weather station using DHT11 and BMP180 with an Arduino. However, the project has a downside which is the power consumption of the 16X2 LCD. If we were building a battery powered project with the desire to last for several weeks and probably several months, like a weather station for instance, then we’ll have to replace the LCD keypad shield from the previous tutorials and go for something like the low powered Nokia 5110 84×84 LCD display. In this tutorial I will be showing you how to drive this display with the Arduino and thus build projects with longer battery life.

Since we are just going to drive the display we won’t be needing sensors for this tutorial, however we will need the components listed below which include the Nokia 5110 itself and we will show how to drive the display using an Arduino board.

The Nokia 5110 display is basically a graphic LCD display useful for a lot of applications. It was intended originally to be used as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. This display uses a low powered CMOS LCD controller/driver PCD8544, which drives the graphic display of size 84×48. It is very cheap and costs about 3$. You can get one here.

The Nokia 5110 LCD can display text, graphics as well as bitmaps. When this display is fully lit, it draws about 10mA but with the backlight off, it draws as low as 0.4mA. The power consumed by this display is very low compared to that of the keypad LCD shield used in the previous tutorial. I will be using the Arduino Mega for this tutorial as usual and you can buy one here. You can also buy jumpers, breadboards and power bank which you will be needing for this tutorial.

The display has two sides to which headers pins can be connected. You can pick one of the sides and solder header pins so that the display can fit firmly on the breadboard. The display works best when powered with 3.3 volts.

Before we start writing the code for this project, first we need to download the 5110 LCD graph library that was made by rinky-dink electronics. The library does most of the heavy lifting and makes it easy for us o use the LCD. Click here to visit the download page and then download the LCD5110_graph zip file. When done, unzip the file to your preferred location and then rename the unzipped folder to something simple like “LCD5110”. Copy and paste this folder in your arduino library folder, then run your arduino IDE.

Click on the file, then on examples and then click on LCD5110. Since we are using the Arduino Mega, under the LCD5110 drop down click on Arduino (AVR) and the open up the LCD graph demo file.

In the code we only have to change a few things. we can see from the comment section above that the RST pin of the display was connected to pin 11 but in our case we connected this pin to pin 12 of the Arduino Mega. We also have to change the CS from pin 12 to 11.

The first line after the comment section, the LCD5110 library was included and after that a myGLCD object was created with the numbers being the pins to which the LCD is connected. The last two values in the myGLCD object is the RST and CS values which has been changed as explained initially.

with this done, we move to the setup function. In the setup function, the InitLCD method is used to initialize the display and this method takes in a parameter for the display contrast. The contrast value is between 0-127 and since we didn’t pass in any value the default value which is 70 will be used. Next, the setFont method is called which sets smallFont as the display font style is called and lastly, the randomSeed function which is used to initialize the random number generator using analogRead on an unconnected pin as a random input.

In the loop function, on the first line the screen buffer is cleared using the clrScr method. The drawBitmap method was used to draw the arduino logo and this logo is placed in the screen buffer when the method is called. The update method is used to copy the screen buffer to the screen then we give it a delay of 2 seconds before clearing the screen buffer again.

Most of the functions used in the project have names that are self-explanatory like myGLCD.drawLine needs no explanation for instance as its clear the function draws a line.

Here is the full code for this project. Its an example from the Library named LCD5110_Graph_Demo and how to get to it has been described at the beginning of this section.

While in theory an Arduino can run any LCD, we believe that some LCDs are particularly suited to being an Arduino LCD display. We"ve currated this list of LCD displays that will make any Arduino-based project shine.

First is the interface. All of these displays support SPI. Builders often ask themselves (or us) "which interface uses the fewest GPIO pins? AND is that interface fast enough to update the screen at an acceptable rate for my application?" When using the relatively small procesor of the Arduino, SPI is usually the best interface because it takes few wires (either 3 or 4) however it does limit the overall size (number of pixels) that can be quickly controlled. I2C is another choice of interface to leave GPIOs open. We tend to recommend SPI over I2C for Arduino displays because SPI is quicker and better at handling more complex data transfer, like pulling image data from an SD card.

Which brings us to the second factor in choosing an Arduino display: the number of pixels. We typically recommend a display with a resolution of 320x240 or less for use with Arduino. Take for example a 320x240 24-bit display. Such a display takes 230,400 bytes *(8 + 2) = 2,304,000 bits for a single frame. Divide that by 8,000,000 (Arduino SPI speed of 8MHZ) = 0.288 seconds per frame or 3.5 frames per second. 3.5 fps is fast enough for many applications, but is not particularly quick. Using fewer bits-per-pixel or a display with fewer pixels will result in higher frame rates. Use the calculator below to calculate the frame rate for a display using SPI with an Arduino.

Third, we want to recommend displays that are easy to connect to an Arduino. Each of these displays has a ZIF tail or easily solderable throughholes, so no fine pitch soldering is needed. These displays can either be brought up on the CFA10102 generic breakout board, or with a custom CFA breakout board.

Most character displays can be run via Parallel connection to an Arduino. You"ll want to make sure you can supply enough current to operate the backlight.

The datasheet says that it"s extremely low power. I hooked it up and was measuring a current of 2.0 to 2.25mA depending on whether it was active or sleeping. This didn"t make sense since it was advertised as being super low power. I realized that I had been given the 5V version which includes a 3.3v linear regulator (large 3-pin chip on left side of image). I removed the regulator since I"m running it at 3.3V, but that only reduced the current consumption by a small amount. The PCB I received has a Chinese font serial EPROM in the upper left corner (U1 - missing in the photo). Since I don"t intend to use it, I removed it and now the current measures from 0 (sleeping) to 276uA (active). This is nearly half the active current (400uA) of the Nokia 5110 and at a higher resolution. The backlighting is bright and evenly distributed and only draws an additional 4.8mA. If any of you have the same PCB that I bought and were wondering why it was drawing so much current, hopefully this info has helped you.

We have published quite a number of tutorials using different displays with the Arduino, with the most recent being the tutorial on displaying graphics on all kind of displays with Arduino. For today’s tutorial, we will look into achieving more with displays by implementing a menu based system with the Nokia 5110 LCD display and the Arduino. The menu is one of the easiest and most intuitive ways through which users interact with products that require navigation. From mobile phone to PCs, its applications are endless. Today we will explore how to add this cool feature to your Arduino project.

At the heart of today’s project is the Nokia 5110 LCD Display. The Nokia 5110 LCD is one of the most popular LCD display among makers. It was originally developed for use as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. The display uses a low power CMOS LCD controller/driver, the PCD8544, which drives the 84×48px graphics display. In a normal state, the display consumes about 6 to 7mA which makes it quite ideal for low power devices. We have published quite a number of tutorials on this display that might help you understand how to drive such a display.

To showcase how to create the menu on a display with the Arduino, we will build a simple demo menu with three pages.  To navigate through the menu, we will use 3x push buttons. The first to scroll up, the second to scroll down and the third one to select a highlighted option. The first screen/page of the menu will serve as the home page and will host the options that open the next two screens/pages. The second page will open after the first menu option on the homepage has been selected. Users will be able to change the contrast of the display using the up and down push buttons to increase or reduce it respectively. By pressing the select button, users will be able to go back to the home page. The second option on the homepage displays the third page, where users will be able to turn the backlight of the display on/off by pressing the select item button.

To make the schematics easy to follow, a pin map of the connection between the Arduino Uno and the Nokia 5110, which isthe major component, is shown below.

Looking at the schematics, you will see that the push buttons are connected to the Arduino without the common pull-up or pull-down resistors. This is because we will use the Arduino’s internal pull-up resistor. You can read more about using pull-up/down resistors here. If you have any challenges understanding the concept, do reach out to me via the comment section.

To be fair, the code for today’s tutorial is a little bit complex and while I will do my best to break it down and ensure you understand the basics, it might take you building your own menu to fully grab the concept. The code for today is heavily dependent on two major libraries; The Adafruit GFX library and the Adafruit Nokia 5110 LCD Library. The Adafruit GFX library is probably one of the libraries we use the most in our tutorials. It makes it easy to display graphics and perform simple animations on supported displays. The Nokia 5110 LCD library, on the other hand, reduces the amount of work and code required to interact with the LCD.

We start the code as with other sketches by including all the libraries required for the project which in this case, are the Adafruit GFX and Nokia 5110 LCD libraries.

Next, we write the void setup function. Here we declare all the pins to which the push buttons are connected as inputs and set digital pin 7 as output since the Light pin of the LCD is connected to it. This pin will be used to turn the backlight on/off later on.

Go through the schematics one more time to ensure everything is connected as it should be, then connect the Arduino to your computer and upload the code. After a couple of seconds, you should see the menu displayed on the LCD and it should respond to the push buttons when pressed.

In the previous tutorial I showed how to build a weather station using DHT11 and BMP180 with an Arduino. However, the project has a downside which is the power consumption of the 16X2 LCD. If we were building a battery powered project with the desire to last for several weeks and probably several months, like a weather station for instance, then we’ll have to replace the LCD keypad shield from the previous tutorials and go for something like the low powered Nokia 5110 84×84 LCD display. In this tutorial I will be showing you how to drive this display with the Arduino and thus build projects with longer battery life.

Since we are just going to drive the display we won’t be needing sensors for this tutorial, however we will need the components listed below which include the Nokia 5110 itself and we will show how to drive the display using an Arduino board.

The Nokia 5110 display is basically a graphic LCD display useful for a lot of applications. It was intended originally to be used as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. This display uses a low powered CMOS LCD controller/driver PCD8544, which drives the graphic display of size 84×48. It is very cheap and costs about 3$. You can get one here.

The Nokia 5110 LCD can display text, graphics as well as bitmaps. When this display is fully lit, it draws about 10mA but with the backlight off, it draws as low as 0.4mA. The power consumed by this display is very low compared to that of the keypad LCD shield used in the previous tutorial. I will be using the Arduino Mega for this tutorial as usual and you can buy one here. You can also buy jumpers, breadboards and power bank which you will be needing for this tutorial.

Before we start writing the code for this project, first we need to download the 5110 LCD graph library that was made by rinky-dink electronics. The library does most of the heavy lifting and makes it easy for us o use the LCD. Click here to visit the download page and then download the LCD5110_graph zip file. When done, unzip the file to your preferred location and then rename the unzipped folder to something simple like “LCD5110”. Copy and paste this folder in your arduino library folder, then run your arduino IDE.

Click on the file, then on examples and then click on LCD5110. Since we are using the Arduino Mega, under the LCD5110 drop down click on Arduino (AVR) and the open up the LCD graph demo file.

In the code we only have to change a few things. we can see from the comment section above that the RST pin of the display was connected to pin 11 but in our case we connected this pin to pin 12 of the Arduino Mega. We also have to change the CS from pin 12 to 11.

The first line after the comment section, the LCD5110 library was included and after that a myGLCD object was created with the numbers being the pins to which the LCD is connected. The last two values in the myGLCD object is the RST and CS values which has been changed as explained initially.

with this done, we move to the setup function. In the setup function, the InitLCD method is used to initialize the display and this method takes in a parameter for the display contrast. The contrast value is between 0-127 and since we didn’t pass in any value the default value which is 70 will be used. Next, the setFont method is called which sets smallFont as the display font style is called and lastly, the randomSeed function which is used to initialize the random number generator using analogRead on an unconnected pin as a random input.

In the loop function, on the first line the screen buffer is cleared using the clrScr method. The drawBitmap method was used to draw the arduino logo and this logo is placed in the screen buffer when the method is called. The update method is used to copy the screen buffer to the screen then we give it a delay of 2 seconds before clearing the screen buffer again.

Most of the functions used in the project have names that are self-explanatory like myGLCD.drawLine needs no explanation for instance as its clear the function draws a line.

Here is the full code for this project. Its an example from the Library named LCD5110_Graph_Demo and how to get to it has been described at the beginning of this section.

Are you bored by making those projects that don’t grab your interest? And, that’s why feeling demotivated? And are you looking for some interesting project that excites and motivates you? You’re in the right spot. Because, In this tutorial, we’ll interface “Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino UNO” The Nokia 5110 LCD is one of the devices that are used to display words, numbers, images, etc. The reason to use Nokia LCD is that it’s inexpensive and easily get interfaced with Arduino.

Nokia 5110 is a simple graphic LCD. Initially, it was made to use as a mobile phone screen. The LCD contains the PCD8544 controller in it. Practically, it’s a low-powered controller. This controller was designed to display 48 rows and 84 cols on an LCD screen. The LCD is easy to solder and mount on board. Also, it’s easy to interface with any microcontroller.

Assemble the circuit to interface “Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino UNO” according to the above-given diagram. Upload the code in Arduino. When you upload the code in it, the Arduino transfers it to the LCD through wires/buses. And, you will see that LCD will display “Hello World”. Use the potentiometer to increase or decrease the light intensity.

In the void setup, initialize the LCD by Lcd.begin(84, 48). Remember, that this 84 and 48 is the dimension of LCD. Then createchar( ) is used to create the character fonts for the LED matrices.

Here I’ve added a the 5110 LCD to a logger recording data from a BME280 & Tipping Bucket Rain gauge. If the BME  survives in our field environment, this will become a standard configuration for our climate stations. I