arduino lcd display no text made in china

just displays black boxes on lines 1 and 3 (at the highest level of contrast) and nothing other wise. It should display hello world on the first line and time in seconds since it started on the second line.This is how i have the pins wired:

I had unfortunately not enough colored cables so I had to use not the right ones, that is the only reason for my repeating colors where I wanted to use the appropriate colors

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2); //In dieser Zeile wird festgelegt, welche Pins des Mikrocontrollerboards für das LCD verwendet wird (Am besten erstmal nicht verändern).

lcd.print("www.funduino.de"); //Dort soll der Text „www.funduino.de“ erscheinen. Der Befehl lcd.setCursor ist dem Mikrocontrollerboard durch das Aufrufen der Bibliothek bekannt.

I am making a stabilizer with a MPU6050 using a arduino uno. I am trying to print out the gyro values on a LCD screen but it just doesnt work. It lights up but nothing more, Ive tested printing out the gyro values and they exist and works. This is my code:

This stems from the fact that the LCD controller itself does not inherently support the function and in fact treats the ASCII codes for and as displayable characters instead of control codes.

The fact that the LiquidCrystal library inherits from Print class and thus permits the use of println() essentially makes things worse. Instead of barfing and spitting out an error message it just happily displays two unrelated characters on the screen and the uninitiated have no idea of the cause.

In my opinion the basic LiquidCrystal library should concentrate on implementing all of the capabilities of the LCD controller and no more. If people want a library that more closely emulates a CRT (or LCD) terminal that is fine, but I think it should be done in a different library.

What do you see? Is the screen blank? Do you have one row of dark boxes? Do you have two rows of dark boxes? Do you have something else? Each of these symptoms is the result of a different cause so what does happen when your display "doesn"t work" can give valuable clues as to the cause.

I suggest that you disconnect everything and then follow the tutorial at Arduino Tutorial - connecting a parallel LCD. About halfway through the tutorial, just before the section labeled "Bus Wiring" is where the contrast is adjusted. If your potentiometer doesn"t work then you will have to be creative with the contrast pin. Some displays work adequately with this pin connected to GND so you should try that first. Most require a small positive voltage, usually less than 1 volt and some require a negative voltage (but those are rare, unless you got your display from a reputable dealer at a relatively low price). If you can"t get the display of a single row of moderately dark boxes then you need not continue.

By the way the LCD pins are numbered starting with 1, not 0, just like IC pins and the vacuum tube pins that preceded them. The contrast voltage is applied to pin 3 which you are incorrectly calling pin 2.

www.reichelt.com : Shipping costs are okay with 6.95 euros. I have been trying to register but I run into about 10 severe website errors. Finally I worked around them and could log in. Once logged in, I can no longer search for items. No response to mail.

www.distrelec.com : my email-address was not accepted, so I had to use another one. The prices on the website are without taxes/VAT. The payment failed, and I got a message that perhaps it was paid and perhaps not. So I have to wait another day to see if it was paid. When I log out, the order was canceled. I can not store the items, so I made a screendump and I probably have select the items again tomorrow.

I am attempting to get my lcd up and running to print out a simple hello world. I am able to get the display to turn on, but whenever I upload the program to the board it will not display text. I have attached pictures of my wiring on the breadboard and on the Arduino, picture of the lcd being on, the code I am running, and a link to the schematic I used.

EDIT: Sorry guys, I thought I changed my picture format. This should be viewable now!! Also, When I initially turn it on it will display boxes on half of the screen that will slowly fade, almost as if it is "dying" unsure if thats useful.

(1) If the module has a backlight then get it working properly. This involves only pins 15 and 16 on most LCD modules. Make sure to use a current limiting resistor if there is none on the LCD module.

(2) Get the power and contrast working properly. This involves only pins 1, 2, and 3 on most LCD modules. You should be able to just barely see blocks on one row of a two row display and on two rows of a four row display.

NOTE: The Arduino has not been used yet, except as a possible source for the power needed for the first two steps. Do not try to go any further until this is working. If you don"t see the blocks then no amount of program code will help.

If you get a display but it is garbled or has some other problems then try again with a "static" sketch, one that displays a simple message on the top row of the display and then stops. All of your code should be in setup() and loop() should be empty between the brackets.

If you are still having problems then we need to see a photograph of your setup that clearly and unambiguously shows all of the connections between your Arduino and your LCD module. We also need a copy/paste version of the code that you are actually using, not a link to the code that you think you are using.

At startup, we can now load our bitmaps into one or more of the CGRAM locations. Let"s make outselves some Space Invader aliens!void load_custom_bitmaps() {

I"ve been tinkering with my new Arduino a bit and I was adding an LCD from the starter kit, using information from the eleventh project in the project book, "Crystal Ball." When I connect the Arduino to my computer, the LCD lights up, but no text is displayed on the screen.

edit: Additionally, I tried adding a potentiometer to control the display, but to no avail. Below is the wiring for this (back pin goes to the third to last pin for the LCD).

In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

The next example is controlling an RGB LED using these three RGB sliders. For example if we start to slide the blue slider, the LED will light up in blue and increase the light as we would go to the maximum value. So the sliders can move from 0 to 255 and with their combination we can set any color to the RGB LED,  but just keep in mind that the LED cannot represent the colors that much accurate.

As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.

So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels  down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.

Next is the distance sensor button. First we need to set the color and then using the fillRoundRect() function we will draw the rounded rectangle. Then we will set the color back to white and using the drawRoundRect() function we will draw another rounded rectangle on top of the previous one, but this one will be without a fill so the overall appearance of the button looks like it has a frame. On top of the button we will print the text using the big font and the same background color as the fill of the button. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

Now we need to make the buttons functional so that when we press them they would send us to the appropriate example. In the setup section we set the character ‘0’ to the currentPage variable, which will indicate that we are at the home screen. So if that’s true, and if we press on the screen this if statement would become true and using these lines here we will get the X and Y coordinates where the screen has been pressed. If that’s the area that covers the first button we will call the drawDistanceSensor() custom function which will activate the distance sensor example. Also we will set the character ‘1’ to the variable currentPage which will indicate that we are at the first example. The drawFrame() custom function is used for highlighting the button when it’s pressed. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work  you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:

Arduino (open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, while software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL),manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors.

Arduino board designs use a variety of microprocessors and controllers. The boards are equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards ("shields") or breadboards (for prototyping) and other circuits. The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, which are also used for loading programs. The microcontrollers can be programmed using the C and C++ programming languages, using a standard API which is also known as the Arduino language, inspired by the Processing language and used with a modified version of the Processing IDE. In addition to using traditional compiler toolchains, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) and a command line tool developed in Go.

The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy,sensors and actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats and motion detectors.

The name Arduino comes from a bar in Ivrea, Italy, where some of the founders of the project used to meet. The bar was named after Arduin of Ivrea, who was the margrave of the March of Ivrea and King of Italy from 1002 to 1014.

The Arduino project was started at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Ivrea, Italy.BASIC Stamp microcontroller at a cost of $50. In 2003 Hernando Barragán created the development platform Casey Reas. Casey Reas is known for co-creating, with Ben Fry, the Processing development platform. The project goal was to create simple, low cost tools for creating digital projects by non-engineers. The Wiring platform consisted of a printed circuit board (PCB) with an ATmega128 microcontroller, an IDE based on Processing and library functions to easily program the microcontroller.Arduino.

Following the completion of the platform, lighter and less expensive versions were distributed in the open-source community. It was estimated in mid-2011 that over 300,000 official Arduinos had been commercially produced,

At the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino"s company, Smart Projects, registered the Arduino trademark in Italy and kept this a secret from the other co-founders for about two years. This was revealed when the Arduino company tried to register the trademark in other areas of the world (they originally registered only in the US), and discovered that it was already registered in Italy. Negotiations with Martino and his firm to bring the trademark under control of the original Arduino company failed. In 2014, Smart Projects began refusing to pay royalties. They then appointed a new CEO, Federico Musto, who renamed the company Arduino SRL and created the website arduino.org, copying the graphics and layout of the original arduino.cc. This resulted in a rift in the Arduino development team.

At the World Maker Faire in New York on 1 October 2016, Arduino LLC co-founder and CEO Massimo Banzi and Arduino SRL CEO Federico Musto announced the merger of the two companies.

In April 2017, Wired reported that Musto had "fabricated his academic record... On his company"s website, personal LinkedIn accounts, and even on Italian business documents, Musto was, until recently, listed as holding a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In some cases, his biography also claimed an MBA from New York University." Wired reported that neither university had any record of Musto"s attendance, and Musto later admitted in an interview with Wired that he had never earned those degrees.open source licenses, schematics, and code from the Arduino website, prompting scrutiny and outcry.

By 2017 Arduino AG owned many Arduino trademarks. In July 2017 BCMI, founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, acquired Arduino AG and all the Arduino trademarks. Fabio Violante is the new CEO replacing Federico Musto, who no longer works for Arduino AG.

In October 2017, Arduino announced its partnership with ARM Holdings (ARM). The announcement said, in part, "ARM recognized independence as a core value of Arduino ... without any lock-in with the ARM architecture". Arduino intends to continue to work with all technology vendors and architectures.

Under Violante"s guidance, the company started growing again and releasing new designs. The Genuino trademark was dismissed and all products were branded again with the Arduino name. As of February 2020, the Arduino community included about 30 million active users based on the IDE downloads.

In August 2018, Arduino announced its new open source command line tool (arduino-cli), which can be used as a replacement of the IDE to program the boards from a shell.

Arduino is open-source hardware. The hardware reference designs are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and are available on the Arduino website. Layout and production files for some versions of the hardware are also available.

Although the hardware and software designs are freely available under copyleft licenses, the developers have requested the name Arduino to be exclusive to the official product and not be used for derived works without permission. The official policy document on use of the Arduino name emphasizes that the project is open to incorporating work by others into the official product.-duino.

An early Arduino boardRS-232 serial interface (upper left) and an Atmel ATmega8 microcontroller chip (black, lower right); the 14 digital I/O pins are at the top, the 6 analog input pins at the lower right, and the power connector at the lower left.

Most Arduino boards consist of an Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller (ATmega8,ATmega328, ATmega1280, or ATmega2560) with varying amounts of flash memory, pins, and features.Arduino Due, based on the Atmel SAM3X8E was introduced in 2012.shields. Multiple and possibly stacked shields may be individually addressable via an I2C serial bus. Most boards include a 5 V linear regulator and a 16 MHz crystal oscillator or ceramic resonator. Some designs, such as the LilyPad,

Arduino microcontrollers are pre-programmed with a boot loader that simplifies uploading of programs to the on-chip flash memory. The default bootloader of the Arduino Uno is the Optiboot bootloader.RS-232 logic levels and transistor–transistor logic (TTL) level signals. Current Arduino boards are programmed via Universal Serial Bus (USB), implemented using USB-to-serial adapter chips such as the FTDI FT232. Some boards, such as later-model Uno boards, substitute the FTDI chip with a separate AVR chip containing USB-to-serial firmware, which is reprogrammable via its own ICSP header. Other variants, such as the Arduino Mini and the unofficial Boarduino, use a detachable USB-to-serial adapter board or cable, Bluetooth or other methods. When used with traditional microcontroller tools, instead of the Arduino IDE, standard AVR in-system programming (ISP) programming is used.

The Arduino board exposes most of the microcontroller"s I/O pins for use by other circuits. The Diecimila,Duemilanove,Unopulse-width modulated signals, and six analog inputs, which can also be used as six digital I/O pins. These pins are on the top of the board, via female 0.1-inch (2.54 mm) headers. Several plug-in application shields are also commercially available. The Arduino Nano, and Arduino-compatible Bare Bones Boardbreadboards.

Many Arduino-compatible and Arduino-derived boards exist. Some are functionally equivalent to an Arduino and can be used interchangeably. Many enhance the basic Arduino by adding output drivers, often for use in school-level education,

Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards use printed circuit expansion boards called shields, which plug into the normally supplied Arduino pin headers.3D printing and other applications, GNSS (satellite navigation), Ethernet, liquid crystal display (LCD), or breadboarding (prototyping). Several shields can also be made do it yourself (DIY).

Some shields offer stacking headers which allows multiple shields to be stacked on top of an Arduino board. Here, a prototyping shield is stacked on two Adafruit motor shield V2s.

Adafruit Motor Shield with screw terminals for connection to motors. Officially discontinued, this shield may still be available through unofficial channels.

A program for Arduino hardware may be written in any programming language with compilers that produce binary machine code for the target processor. Atmel provides a development environment for their 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M based microcontrollers: AVR Studio (older) and Atmel Studio (newer).

The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application (for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux) that is written in the Java programming language. It originated from the IDE for the languages brace matching, and syntax highlighting, and provides simple one-click mechanisms to compile and upload programs to an Arduino board. It also contains a message area, a text console, a toolbar with buttons for common functions and a hierarchy of operation menus. The source code for the IDE is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

The Arduino IDE supports the languages C and C++ using special rules of code structuring. The Arduino IDE supplies a software library from the Wiring project, which provides many common input and output procedures. User-written code only requires two basic functions, for starting the sketch and the main program loop, that are compiled and linked with a program stub main() into an executable cyclic executive program with the GNU toolchain, also included with the IDE distribution. The Arduino IDE employs the program avrdude to convert the executable code into a text file in hexadecimal encoding that is loaded into the Arduino board by a loader program in the board"s firmware.

From version 1.8.12, Arduino IDE windows compiler supports only Windows 7 or newer OS. On Windows Vista or older one gets "Unrecognized Win32 application" error when trying to verify/upload program. To run IDE on older machines, users can either use version 1.8.11, or copy "arduino-builder" executable from version 11 to their current install folder as it"s independent from IDE.

Most Arduino boards contain a light-emitting diode (LED) and a current-limiting resistor connected between pin 13 and ground, which is a convenient feature for many tests and program functions.Hello, World!, is "blink", which repeatedly blinks the on-board LED integrated into the Arduino board. This program uses the functions pinMode(), digitalWrite(), and delay(), which are provided by the internal libraries included in the IDE environment.

The open-source nature of the Arduino project has facilitated the publication of many free software libraries that other developers use to augment their projects.

There is also a threading tool, named Protothreads. Protothreads are described as "extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes.

Di Tore, Stefano; Todino, Michele Domenic; Plutino, Antonia (2019). "Le wearable technologies e la metafora dei sei cappelli per pensare a supporto del seamless learning". Professionalità. 4 (II): 118–13issn=0392–279.

Di Tore, Stefano; Todino, Michele; Sibilio, Maurizio (2019-04-30). "Disuffo: Design, prototyping and development of an open-source educational robot". Form@re - Open Journal per la Formazione in Rete (in Italian). 19 (1): 106–116. doi:10.13128/FORMARE-24446. S2CID 181368197.

Dunkels, A.; Schmidt, O.; Voigt, T. (2005). Using Protothreads for Sensor Node Programming. Proceedings of the REALWSN 2005 Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks Presented at the REALWSN 2005 Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks.

This post is an introduction to the Nextion display with the Arduino. We’re going to show you how to configure the display for the first time, download the needed resources, and how to integrate it with the Arduino UNO board. We’ll also make a simple graphical user interface to control the Arduino pins.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution. Nextion displays are resistive touchscreens that makes it easy to build a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a great solution to monitor and control processes, being mainly applied to IoT applications.

The Nextion has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls the display, for example it takes care of generating the buttons, creating text, store images or change the background. The Nextion communicates with any microcontroller using serial communication at a 9600 baud rate.

To design the GUI, you use the Nextion Editor, in which you can add buttons, gauges, progress bars, text labels, and more to the user interface in an easy way. We have the 2.8” Nextion display basic model, that is shown in the following figure.

Connecting the Nextion display to the Arduino is very straightforward. You just need to make four connections: GND, RX, TX, and +5V. These pins are labeled at the back of your display, as shown in the figure below.

You can power up the Nextion display directly from the Arduino 5V pin, but it is not recommended. Working with insufficient power supply may damage the display. So, you should use an external power source. You should use a 5V/1A power adaptor with a micro USB cable. Along with your Nextion display, you’ll also receive a USB to 2 pin connector, useful to connect the power adaptor to the display.

The best way to get familiar with a new software and a new device is to make a project example. Here we’re going to create a user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins, and display data.

The user interface has two pages: one controls two LEDs connected to the Arduino pins, and the other shows data gathered from the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor;

We won’t cover step-by-step how to build the GUI in the Nextion display. But we’ll show you how to build the most important parts, so that you can learn how to actually build the user interface. After following the instructions, you should be able to complete the user interface yourself.

Additionally, we provide all the resources you need to complete this project. Here’s all the resources you need (be aware that you may need to change some settings on the user interface to match your display size):

We’ll start by adding a background image. To use an image as a background, it should have the exact same dimensions as your Nextion display. We’re using the 2.8” display, so the background image needs to be 240×320 pixels. Check your display dimensions and edit your background image accordingly. As an example, we’re using the following image:

Here you can select the font height, type, spacing and if you want it to be bold or not. Give it a name and click the Generate font button. After that, save the .zi file and add the generator font by clicking yes.

Note: At the time of writing this instructions there is an issue with font types. Whatever font type you chose, it will always look the same.Still, you can edit the font size and if it is bold or not.

At this moment, you can start adding components to the display area. For our project, drag three buttons, two labels and one slider, as shown in the figure below. Edit their looks as you like.

All components have an attribute called objname. This is the name of the component. Give good names to your components because you’ll need them later for the Arduino code. Also note that each component has one id number that is unique to that component in that page. The figure below shows the objname and id for the slider.

You should trigger an event for the touchable components (the buttons and the slider) so that the Arduino knows that a component was touched. You can trigger events when you press or when you release a component.

Our second page will display data from the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. We have several labels to hold the temperature in Celsius, the temperature in Fahrenheit, and the humidity. We also added a progress bar to display the humidity and an UPDATE button to refresh the readings. The bBack button redirects to page0.

Notice that we have labels to hold the units like “ºC”, “ºF” and “%”, and empty labels that will be filled with the readings when we have our Arduino code running.

Once the GUI is ready, you need to write the Arduino code so that the Nextion can interact with the Arduino and vice-versa. Writing code to interact with the Nextion display is not straightforward for beginners, but it also isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

A good way to learn how to write code for the Arduino to interact with the Nextion display is to go to the examples folder in the Nextion library folder and explore. You should be able to copy and paste code to make the Arduino do what you want.

The first thing you should do is to take note of your components in the GUI that will interact with the Arduino and take note of their ID, names and page. Here’s a table of all the components the code will interact to (your components may have a different ID depending on the order you’ve added them to the GUI).

Here you use the page ID, the component ID and their name – just check the table above with all the components. To define a text you use NexText, to define a button you use NexButton, for a slider you use NexSlider and for the progress bar you use NexProgressBar.

This function will set the led1 to HIGH, as well as update the tState label with the text “State: on”. Updating text labels is as simple as using setText().

Finally, you need a function for the bUpdate (the update button). When you click this button the DHT temperature and humidity sensor reads temperature and humidity and displays them on the corresponding labels, as well as the humidity on the progress bar. That is the bUpdatePopCallback() function.

In this post we’ve introduced you to the Nextion display. We’ve also created a simple application user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins. The application built is just an example for you to understand how to interface different components with the Arduino – we hope you’ve found the instructions as well as the example provided useful.

In our opinion, Nextion is a great display that makes the process of creating user interfaces simple and easy. Although the Nextion Editor has some issues and limitations it is a great choice for building interfaces for your electronics projects. We have a project on how to create a Node-RED physical interface with the Nextion display and an ESP8266 to control outputs. Feel free to take a look.

A lcd display is an effective and economic means to visually present data collected by an Arduino. On the market is a great variety of lcd displays. Most common are monochrome displays capable of presenting two lines with each 16 characters (16×2) and displays that show four lines with each 20 characters (20×4). Here we will discuss the basics of connecting a 16×2 lcd display to an Arduino. After that we will connect a Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensor to the Arduino with the purpose to display sensor data. Simple sketches are provided at successive stages while we will walk through each sketch.

Data collected with a sensor connected to an Arduino can be presented in many ways. They can be displayed on your computer via Serial Monitor, transmitted to another Arduino or even to a server on the internet to have them available for final display on your smartphone, tablet or any other suitable platform. An elegant, maybe the ‘historical’ way that is very useful in standalone situations, is to use a display of some sorts connected directly to the Arduino board. Most common today are displays based on lcd, OLED or TFT technology. I assume that lcd displays were the first made available to the Arduino community. Most are compatible with the de facto Hitachi HD44780 standard. Many manufacturers, mostly Chinese, are flushing the market with affordable lcd displays ready to be connected with an Arduino.

Figure 1: Front view of a classic, China made 16×2 lcd display ready to connect with an Arduino. The pin interface has 16 pins numbered 1 to 16. On some displays (like this one) connectivity code is printed onto the printed circuit board. Note that the 220 Ω resistor between 5V and pin 15 is necessary to reduce the voltage to the backlight led to 3.3V.

Such displays are available in various tastes, colors and numbers of characters that can be displayed. As this is a ‘basic’ paper, I will discuss here the 16×2 monochrome display (two lines of 16 characters each) because I regard this device as the ‘mother of all lcd displays’. They are perfect for the beginner and they may as well perfectly serve needs of more advanced Arduino hobbyists. Many permanent projects can be equipped with a lcd display to provide visual information, for instance digital clocks and timers, water temperature control devices, moisture sensor devices, tachometers, barometers, complete weather stations, etcetera.

Pin 3 of the display must be connected with the middle contact, named in jargon the ‘’wiper’, of a 10 kΩ potentiometer. Only one of the other two pins of the potentiometer must be  connected to GND. You can ignore the other pin. This pot meter supplies a voltage to the display that adjusts the contrast of the characters against the (fixed illumination) background.  Power for the background illumination is supplied via pins 15 and 16 of the display. Background illumination is achieved with a white led and a diffuser. The diffuser sticks out on the side of the display (figure 1). As leds are typically 3.3V devices, a 220 Ω resistor is needed in series at pin 15 to protect the backlight led from receiving too much power.

As the potentiometer is only needed to fine-tune the contrast one can experiment to connect pin 3 via a resistor with a fixed value with GND of the Arduino. Begin the experiments with a 10 kΩ resistor and replace it stepwise with one with a lower value until a satisfactory contrast is achieved. With the display shown in figures 1 and 2 a 470 Ω resistor sufficed.

Data from the Arduino to be displayed on the lcd display run via pins 11,12,13 and 14 of the display. Display pin 11 is connected with pin 5 of the Arduino, display pin 12 with pin 4 of the Arduino, display pin 13 with pin 3 of the Arduino, and display pin 14 with pin 2 of the Arduino.

Once the proper pins of the lcd display are connected with the proper pins of the Arduino and connectivity has been double checked, the Arduino is connected to a computer and the following sketch can be compiled and uploaded.

The sketch starts with reference to a library. This library is supplied with the Arduino IDE, so don’t worry about starting a search on the internet to download it.

Pins ’11’ and 12′ refer here to the RS and RS-enable functions while 5,4,3 and 2 refer to the pins used to transfer data from the Arduino to the display. Note that you can setup data connectivity of your LCD from other pins on the Arduino, e.g. pins 8, 7, 6 and 5, but in all cases you have to declare these pins explicitly in the ‘LiquidCrystal lcd (…) statement.

This instruction tells the software that the connected lcd display is a 16×2 type. If your lcd is a 20×4 type, then the proper instruction is ‘lcd.begin (20, 4);’

And then the loop is announced. However, since in this basic sketch only one text is displayed once and forever in the ‘setup’ section there is no need to add instructions to the ‘loop’ section:

When the contrast potentiometer is turned to maximum contrast it can easily be seen that the characters are embedded in rectangle like structures. In a 16×2 lcd display there are two lines. Each consists of 16 of these rectangles. Each rectangle is formed by a matrix of 8 pixels high and 5 pixels wide. Each of the 40 individual pixels in a rectangle can be set ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’. Usually they are in ‘OFF ‘ position, that is: they have he same intensity as the background. Any letter, number or special character consists of a special configuration of ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ pixels in their 8×5 matrix. In the HDM44780 chip 255 pre-programmed characters are available by default. This set of characters is called the lcd’s ‘ASCII character set’.

The following sketch, ‘ascii_lcd_character_set.ino’ displays on the lcd display in a loop the following data. On the first line comes the decimal (ascii) value of the character while on the second line of the display the character itself appears.

One of the funny things with the character set is that there is room for creating your own favorite character, icon or emoji. The Arduino has memory space to hold eight custom characters. Creating your own character works as follows.

Figure 4: Creating your own custom character in the 5×8 lcd pixel matrix of a lcd display ‘character’ rectangle. Here we create a ‘smiley’ and a ‘weepy’. In the byte matrix a ‘1’ means ‘pixel ON’ while a ‘0’ means ‘pixel OFF’.

Each character is built up of five bytes. Each bit corresponds with one pixel of the character, and as a bit can be ‘0’ or ‘1’, whether or not a pixel is displayed, is defined by how the byte has been set.

An example is shown in Figure 4. Please note that every byte is responsible for the eight vertical pixels that belong to the byte’s column. This is obviously done to support efficient left-right scrolling of text.

While we have defined the 8×5 pixel matrix of each custom character an additional instruction named ‘lcd.createChar’, is required before we can print the custom character to the lcd. Up to 8 custom characters are allowed:

Note on the uint8_t: In the official reference section on the Arduino forum (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/LiquidCrystalCreateChar) the instruction says ‘lcd.write(byte(0)’. The Arduino IDE compiler needs to know however that this byte is of the unsigned 8-bit type: an uint8_t.

The loop of the sketch is quite straightforward: we print the ‘smile’ character to the first position of the lcd display, leave it in place for one second and then replace it with the ‘weep’ character. As these instructions are in the loop section the program will run forever.

It is interesting to create a custom character for the superscript ‘degree’ character when we are going to display temperatures in the next section of this paper.

This is a small, cheap and accurate sensor that records temperatures between -55 and 125 oC (-67°F to +257°F). Such a range is perfect for most applications. The accuracy in the working range (-10 to +85 oC) is 0.5 oC. One big advantage is that the DS18B20 is a one-wire device: for communication with an Arduino only one pin on the microcontroller board is necessary. Multiple DS18B20s can be connected with the Arduino via the same communication wire because each DS18B20 has a unique 8-bit identification tag. Calling this tag produces the response only of the sensor with that tag while other, identical sensors wired through the same line do not respond. A so-called pull-up resistor with a value of 4.7 kΩ between the data wire and 5V is necessary to maintain a stable signal (see wiring diagram in figure 6). If this resistor is absent, the sensor may not be recognized by the Arduino or readings may be unreliable.

The sketch, named ‘single_DS18B20_lcd_display.ino’ uses three libraries: the built-in LiquidCrystal.h and the external OneWire.h and DallasTemperature.h. The external libraries are available in the public domain (https://www.arduinolibraries.info/libraries/one-wire).

The OneWire library needs to know with which Arduino pin the sensor is expected to communicate. In our example the sensor’s data pin is connected to Arduino pin 9. In the example we soft define this pin (as a variable). In case we might need another pin we only have to change here the pin number and not worry whether the pin number must be changed elsewhere in the sketch.

Next we need to supply the unique device address. Each DS18B20 has its own 8-byte long address which can be detected with a sketch, ‘DS18B20_address_finder.ino’.

The setup part takes care of identifying the sensor to the Arduino, it creates the special character ‘superscipt-degree’, sets up the lcd and instructs the lcd display to display (print) the so-called ‘permanent’ characters that is the characters that will be seen on the display al the time. In the ‘loop’ section only the variable data (temperature readouts) need to be sent to the lcd display. This is efficient, improves the speed and avoids flickering of the display. We also have Serial Monitor at hand in case trouble shooting is necessary.

Subroutines: These are calculations or procedures that are repeatedly necessary in the sketch. These tasks can be placed outside the loop and called from within the loop. Often, subroutines deal with a specific task, here control of the dynamic part of getting and displaying sensor data on the lcd display Apart from preventing chaos and therefore supporting higher efficiency the strategy of using subroutines is particularly helpful for debugging. Once a subroutine works the programmer can focus on the main job of the sketch or on other subroutines.

In this paper we have connected a 16×2 lcd ‘classic’ display to an Arduino, discussed the sketch necessary to bring the display to life, attached a DS18B20 temperature sensor to the Arduino and, finally, display sensor data using a custom character.

This classic way of connecting a lcd display to an Arduino uses 6 pins on the Arduino. With a simple application such as a one-wire temperature sensor this is not a major problem. However when an application uses more pins, or when multiple sensors must be connected with the Arduino a ‘shortage’ of pins may threaten the project. In that case an I2C lcd-display might help because the I2C protocol needs only the analog pins A4 and A5 of the Arduino. 16×2 and 20×4 lcd displays with backpack I2C extenders working with I2C are currently available while these extenders can be bought also separately. However, there is a price, that is extra use of memory. The sketch ‘single_DS18B20_lcd_display’ uses 9,106 bytes of program memory and 487 bytes of dynamic memory to run with a 16×2 lcd display. The same sketch compiled for the same but now I2C expander-supported 16×2 lcd display, gobbles up 10,928 bytes of program memory and 720 bytes of dynamic memory. The advantage of I2C is less wires and less required pins at the expense of a higher memory load.

In this article, you will learn how to use TFT LCDs by Arduino boards. From basic commands to professional designs and technics are all explained here.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

In electronic’s projects, creating an interface between user and system is very important. This interface could be created by displaying useful data, a menu, and ease of access. A beautiful design is also very important.

There are several components to achieve this. LEDs,  7-segments, Character and Graphic displays, and full-color TFT LCDs. The right component for your projects depends on the amount of data to be displayed, type of user interaction, and processor capacity.

TFT LCD is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

In Arduino-based projects, the processor frequency is low. So it is not possible to display complex, high definition images and high-speed motions. Therefore, full-color TFT LCDs can only be used to display simple data and commands.

In this article, we have used libraries and advanced technics to display data, charts, menu, etc. with a professional design. This can move your project presentation to a higher level.

Size of displays affects your project parameters. Bigger Display is not always better. if you want to display high-resolution images and signs, you should choose a big size display with higher resolution. But it decreases the speed of your processing, needs more space and also needs more current to run.

After choosing the right display, It’s time to choose the right controller. If you want to display characters, tests, numbers and static images and the speed of display is not important, the Atmega328 Arduino boards (such as Arduino UNO) are a proper choice. If the size of your code is big, The UNO board may not be enough. You can use Arduino Mega2560 instead. And if you want to show high resolution images and motions with high speed, you should use the ARM core Arduino boards such as Arduino DUE.

In electronics/computer hardware a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a microprocessor, microcontroller, ASIC or general-purpose peripheral interface and a particular type of display device, e.g. LCD, LED, OLED, ePaper, CRT, Vacuum fluorescent or Nixie.

The display driver will typically accept commands and data using an industry-standard general-purpose serial or parallel interface, such as TTL, CMOS, RS232, SPI, I2C, etc. and generate signals with suitable voltage, current, timing and demultiplexing to make the display show the desired text or image.

The LCDs manufacturers use different drivers in their products. Some of them are more popular and some of them are very unknown. To run your display easily, you should use Arduino LCDs libraries and add them to your code. Otherwise running the display may be very difficult. There are many free libraries you can find on the internet but the important point about the libraries is their compatibility with the LCD’s driver. The driver of your LCD must be known by your library. In this article, we use the Adafruit GFX library and MCUFRIEND KBV library and example codes. You can download them from the following links.

You must add the library and then upload the code. If it is the first time you run an Arduino board, don’t worry. Just follow these steps:Go to www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software of your OS. Install the IDE software as instructed.

By these two functions, You can find out the resolution of the display. Just add them to the code and put the outputs in a uint16_t variable. Then read it from the Serial port by Serial.println(); . First add Serial.begin(9600); in setup().

First you should convert your image to hex code. Download the software from the following link. if you don’t want to change the settings of the software, you must invert the color of the image and make the image horizontally mirrored and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now add it to the software and convert it. Open the exported file and copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are sizes of image. you can change the color of the image in the last input.

Upload your image and download the converted file that the UTFT libraries can process. Now copy the hex code to Arduino IDE. x and y are locations of the image. sx and sy are size of the image.

In this template, We converted a .jpg image to .c file and added to the code, wrote a string and used the fade code to display. Then we used scroll code to move the screen left. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We used sin(); and cos(); functions to draw Arcs with our desired thickness and displayed number by text printing function. Then we converted an image to hex code and added them to the code and displayed the image by bitmap function. Then we used draw lines function to change the style of the image. Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We created a function which accepts numbers as input and displays them as a pie chart. We just use draw arc and filled circle functions.

In this template, We added a converted image to code and then used two black and white arcs to create the pointer of volumes.  Download the .h file and add it to the folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We added a converted image and use the arc and print function to create this gauge.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

while (a < b) { Serial.println(a); j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 255, 255)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

while (b < a) { j = 80 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i = 80 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); j2 = 50 * (sin(PI * a / 2000)); i2 = 50 * (cos(PI * a / 2000)); tft.drawLine(i2 + 235, j2 + 169, i + 235, j + 169, tft.color565(0, 0, 0)); tft.fillRect(200, 153, 75, 33, 0x0000); tft.setTextSize(3); tft.setTextColor(0xffff); if ((a/20)>99)

In this template, We display simple images one after each other very fast by bitmap function. So you can make your animation by this trick.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

In this template, We just display some images by RGBbitmap and bitmap functions. Just make a code for touchscreen and use this template.  Download the .h file and add it to folder of the Arduino sketch.

We have used Liquid Crystal Displays in the DroneBot Workshop many times before, but the one we are working with today has a bit of a twist – it’s a circle!  Perfect for creating electronic gauges and special effects.

LCD, or Liquid Crystal Displays, are great choices for many applications. They aren’t that power-hungry, they are available in monochrome or full-color models, and they are available in all shapes and sizes.

Today we will see how to use this display with both an Arduino and an ESP32. We will also use a pair of them to make some rather spooky animated eyeballs!

Waveshare actually has several round LCD modules, I chose the 1.28-inch model as it was readily available on Amazon. You could probably perform the same experiments using a different module, although you may require a different driver.

There are also some additional connections to the display. One of them, DC, sets the display into either Data or Command mode. Another, BL, is a control for the display’s backlight.

The above illustration shows the connections to the display.  The Waveshare display can be used with either 3.3 or 5-volt logic, the power supply voltage should match the logic level (although you CAN use a 5-volt supply with 3.3-volt logic).

Another difference is simply with the labeling on the display. There are two pins, one labeled SDA and the other labeled SCL. At a glance, you would assume that this is an I2C device, but it isn’t, it’s SPI just like the Waveshare device.

This display can be used for the experiments we will be doing with the ESP32, as that is a 3.3-volt logic microcontroller. You would need to use a voltage level converter if you wanted to use one of these with an Arduino Uno.

The Arduino Uno is arguably the most common microcontroller on the planet, certainly for experiments it is. However, it is also quite old and compared to more modern devices its 16-MHz clock is pretty slow.

The Waveshare device comes with a cable for use with the display. Unfortunately, it only has female ends, which would be excellent for a Raspberry Pi (which is also supported) but not too handy for an Arduino Uno. I used short breadboard jumper wires to convert the ends into male ones suitable for the Arduino.

Once you have everything hooked up, you can start coding for the display. There are a few ways to do this, one of them is to grab the sample code thatWaveshare provides on their Wiki.

The Waveshare Wiki does provide some information about the display and a bit of sample code for a few common controllers. It’s a reasonable support page, unfortunately, it is the only support that Waveshare provides(I would have liked to see more examples and a tutorial, but I guess I’m spoiled by Adafruit and Sparkfun LOL).

Open the Arduino folder. Inside you’ll find quite a few folders, one for each display size that Waveshare supports. As I’m using the 1.28-inch model, I selected theLCD_1inch28folder.

Once you do that, you can open your Arduino IDE and then navigate to that folder. Inside the folder, there is a sketch file namedLCD_1inch28.inowhich you will want to open.

When you open the sketch, you’ll be greeted by an error message in your Arduino IDE. The error is that two of the files included in the sketch contain unrecognized characters. The IDE offers the suggestion of fixing these with the “Fix Encoder & Reload” function (in the Tools menu), but that won’t work.

The error just seems to be with a couple of the Chinese characters used in the comments of the sketch. You can just ignore the error, the sketch will compile correctly in spite of it.

The code is pretty basic, I’m not repeating all of it here, as it consists of several files.  But we can gather quite a bit of knowledge from the main file, as shown here.

You can see from the code that after loading some libraries we initialize the display, set its backlight level (you can use PWM on the BL pin to set the level), and paint a new image. We then proceed to draw lines and strings onto the display.

Unfortunately, Waveshare doesn’t offer documentation for this, but you can gather quite a bit of information by reading theLCD_Driver.cppfile, where the functions are somewhat documented.

After uploading the code, you will see the display show a fake “clock”. It’s a static display, but it does illustrate how you can use this with the Waveshare code.

This library is an extension of the Adafruit GFX library, which itself is one of the most popular display libraries around. Because of this, there isextensive documentation for this libraryavailable from Adafruit.  This makes the library an excellent choice for those who want to write their own applications.

As with the Waveshare sample, this file just prints shapes and text to the display. It is quite an easy sketch to understand, especially with the Adafruit documentation.

The sketch finishes by printing some bizarre text on the display. The text is an excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and it’s a sample of Vogon poetry, which is considered to be the third-worst in the Galaxy!

Here is the hookup for the ESP32 and the GC9A01 display.  As with most ESP32 hookup diagrams, it is important to use the correct GPIO numbers instead of physical pins. The diagram shows the WROVER, so if you are using a different module you’ll need to consult its documentation to ensure that you hook it up properly.

The TFT_eSPI library is ideal for this, and several other, displays. You can install it through your Arduino IDE Library Manager, just search for “TFT_eSPI”.

There is a lot of demo code included with the library. Some of it is intended for other display sizes, but there are a few that you can use with your circular display.

To test out the display, you can use theColour_Test sketch, found inside the Test and Diagnostic menu item inside the library samples.  While this sketch was not made for this display, it is a good way to confirm that you have everything hooked up and configured properly.

A great demo code sample is theAnimated_dialsketch, which is found inside theSpritesmenu item.  This demonstration code will produce a “dial” indicator on the display, along with some simulated “data” (really just a random number generator).

In order to run this sketch, you’ll need to install another library. Install theTjpeg_DecoderLibrary from Library Manager. Once you do, the sketch will compile, and you can upload it to your ESP32.

One of my favorite sketches is the Animated Eyes sketch, which displays a pair of very convincing eyeballs that move. Although it will work on a single display, it is more effective if you use two.

The first thing we need to do is to hook up a second display. To do this, you connect every wire in parallel with the first display, except for the CS (chip select) line.

You can also hook up some optional components to manually control the two “eyeballs”.  You’ll need an analog joystick and a couple of momentary contact, normally open pushbutton switches.

The Animated Eyes sketch can be found within the sample files for the TFT_eSPI library, under the “generic” folder.  Assuming that you have wired up the second GC9A01 display, you’ll want to use theAnimated_Eyes_2sketch.

The GC9A01 LCD module is a 1.28-inch round display that is useful for instrumentation and other similar projects. Today we will learn how to use this display with an Arduino Uno and an ESP32.