msp430 lcd display code made in china

This article is the continuation of our tutorial series on programming MSP430 using Code Composer Studio. Last tutorial was based on GPIO pins. This tutorial is about interfacing a display with MSP430, when it comes to display the 16*2 LCD Display,it is the first choice for any electronic hobbyist. Previously we have also interfaced LCD with MSP430 using Arduino IDE, in this tutorial, we will use the native Code Composer studio platform instead of using the Arduino IDE, this way as a designer, we get more flexibility.

It has an in-built IC hd44780 that can store the command and data passed to it. The LCD Module has about 16 pins. 8 of which are data pins, 4 of them are supply pins for backlight LED and the whole LCD module, 3 for controlling the operation, and 1 pin for contrast adjustment. The tutorial is based on the library created by Dennis Eichmann. It is very easy to use a library with separate functions to print different data types. It also has provisions to display the data in different forms with leading, blanked, and deleted zeroes. It is a pretty expansive and comprehensive library and is configurable to the different connections. Here, the header file is modified to accommodate an 8-pin parallel configuration for data communication.

A generic 16x2 Display has an inbuilt hd44780 IC(circled in red below), that can store the command and data passed to it. The LCD Module has about 16 pins. 8 of which are data pins, 4 of them are supply pins for backlight LED and the whole LCD module, 3 for controlling the operation, and 1 pin for contrast adjustment.

This LCD module is shown above versatile and uses minimum pins compared to other segmented LCDs. If you are curious to know how exactly all this works, you should check out the working of the 16x2 LCD display where we have already discussed how the LCD works in detail.

RS Pin: RS=1 will enable the data register in the LCD, which is used to write the values to the data register in LCD. RS=0 will enable the Instruction register of the LCD.

Enable pin: Negative edge-triggered; when the pin is changed from the HIGH state to LOW state, LCD is prompted to write to the data pins. Positive edge-triggered; when the pin is changed from the LOW state to HIGH state, LCD is prompted to read from the data pins.

The tutorial is based on the library created by Dennis Eichmann. It is very easy to use a library with separate functions to print different data types. It also has provisions to display the data in different forms with leading, blanked, and deleted zeroes. It is a pretty expansive and comprehensive library and is configurable to the different connections. Here, the header file is modified to accommodate an 8-pin parallel configuration for data communication. The library can be download from the below link, after downloading you follow the below steps to add the library to CCS.

In the properties dialog box of the hd44780 project and inside the include options for the MSP430 compiler, add the include folder in file the search path.

In the properties dialog box for the CCS_LCD project and in the file search path of MSP430 Linker tab, include the hd44780.lib located inside the debug folder of the hd44780 project. The debug folder is also included in the file search path.

void hd44780_timer_isr( void ):This is periodically called in the ISR of the Timer A. The Timer A is used to periodically do the LCD functions like clearing the screen, setting the cursor, and displaying the data. The function is to be used in the ISR. It returns nothing.

char * ch__string:The string to be written to the data buffer (inside the hd44780_timer_isrfunction). The data will be copied to the data register and instruction register of the LCD IC when the hd44780_timer_isris periodically called.

uint8_t hd44780_output_unsigned_16bit_value( uint16_t u16__value, uint8_t u8__leading_zero_handling, uint8_t u8__row, uint8_t u8__column, uint8_t u8__cr_lf ):The function will display the unsigned 16-bit value on the desired location of the LCD.

The anode of the LED backlight cannot be connected directly to a 5V supply. It should be connected to a resistance to minimize the current flow through the LCD Module. I have made my connections using a perf board to solder the LCD and then used jumper wires to connect the LCD with the MSP430 board, my set-up looks like this below but you can also simply use a breadboard to make your connections.

The complete code used in this project is given at the bottom of this page. The explanation of using the code is as follows. First, open the header file (hd44780.h) and include the microcontroller part number in the first part of the file.

Inbuilt timer is being used to display values periodically. Timer A is selected with SMCLK (1MHZ) as the clock source and continuous mode being the mode of operation.

Once you have your code compiled, you can upload it to the MSP430 board, as explained in the getting started with the MSP430 tutorial. If everything goes as expected, you should see your LCD display some contrast as shown below.

[Nav] is working on a scratch-built wristwatch. Although it is based on an MSP430 microcontroller, it’s not the ready-to-hack ezCronos that you might be thinking of. Instead, [Nav] started with a different TI development tool that we’ve looked at before, the ez430-F2013.

The breakout board for the F2013 is small enough to meet his needs, but still provides easy soldering with 0.1″ vias that break out each pin. To make sure the timepiece is accurate he added a 32.768 kHz clock crystal. A small, square, LCD screen acts as the face of the watch, but we didn’t find specific part information for the display.

An increasing number of readers have been asking me to add support for other encoders to my Digital Readout application, especially the “standard” Chinese scales and cheap calipers. Although I’ve been experimenting with the idea for some time but never got around to getting it done. Last weekend, while working on step-by-step build instructions for the MSP430 Launchpad DRO controller, I realized that I was much closer to the solution than I previously realized. The MSP430G2553 microcontroller that ships with the newer version of the Launchpad kit is a very capable chip that should be able to read three or four different scales with no problems. After digging through my and my father’s garages, and a trip to Harbor Freight I was able to round up six different-looking calipers and a BG Micro “Digital Indicator”, so I was ready to start experimenting.

Almost all digital calipers and scales use an incremental capacitive transducer to determine their position. In most cases the main scale covers a circuit board that has a special pattern etched on it; inside the main body there is another circuit board with a set of etched strips. By rapidly measuring the capacitance between each strip and the frame PCB, the controller inside the caliper can precisely measure its movement. By knowing how far the transducer has moved from the reference point the scale can then calculate its precise position and display it to the user or send over the wire [to the Launchpad in our case]. There are differences in how the position is encoded and sent over the wire but almost universally these scales use a variant of a synchronous serial protocol. In case iGaging Remote Digital Readout scales the display unit provides the clock; all of the others that I had a chance to test provide their own clock.

The first order of business was to connect the scales to the microcontroller and make sure that it can read the signal. To run at 16MHz, MSP430 Launchpad requires 3.3V power supply. The datasheet states that input threshold voltage min/max is 1.35V and 2.25V respectively at 3V supply. In other words the 1.5V signal coming from the calipers will likely not read as “high”. I first tried powering one of the calipers from 2.5V supply but it promptly let the magic smoke out and died. This was only a minor setback, though, since a voltage level shifter is a basic, easy to build circuit. The idea is to connect the caliper output through a resistor to a NPN transistor as shown in the schematic. This shift the voltage level to 3.3V but will invert the input as well, which can be easily handled in the firmware.

Any resistor value between about 200 Ohm and a 1/2 KOhm should work. Similarly, any NPN transistor would work as well, since MSP430 maximum input current draw is on the order of 2mA. Please keep in mind that some transistors (such as 3904, for example) have the pins reversed so make sure to connect them in the correct direction. Alternatively the whole board can be replaced with a single “Octal Line Driver” IC or two Op Amps.

Second the scales have to be connected to the adapter board. Initially I tried using the proprietary cables [that came with the BG Micro Digital Indicators] but the connection was horribly unreliable on all but Harbor Freight caliper. After a few hours of wiggling the cable I decided to simply solder four vires to the pads and call it good. To access the pads the calipers had to be taken apart but it proved to be fairly easy. There are four bolts hiding under the label on the backside that can be undone using a miniature Philips screwdriver. Once the front sub-assembly is off, there are four more tiny screws inside, holding the main board to the case. The buttons and LCD display will do their best to scatter around so be prepared to catch them. To keep things consistent with the connections used with iGaging scales in the previous versions of the controller I used a sacrificial USB cable. This way all of my scales use Red-White-Green-Black sequence for Vcc, Data, Clock and Ground respectively.

I am current considering use of this display but have not ordered it yet. I am a little hesitant due to the number of users reporting problems with these displays.

I am in the process of creating a PCB footprint for this display, but when applying the 3D model provided, the hole spacing of the display"s connector pads do not appear to be on a 0.100" grid. Is this an error in the model or are the display"s connector pins on a weird spacing? If so, what is the spacing? Any help would be much appreciated.

I had a project that needed some live data display, and looking for the cheapest low-power solution for our loggers lead me to the Nokia 5110 LCD. Once you get the backlight current under control, you can power the entire display from a digital pin, and if you use shiftout for soft SPI you can then get rid of the Reset and CS control lines. This brings the display down to any four wires you can spare on your build (incl. the power pin) and a ground line. This is much more manageable than what you see with the standard hookup guides if your mc is I/O limited like our pro-mini based loggers:

This LCD (I have the old-old kind) is absolutely my favorite. Yes, it has a board-to-glass connector that ranges from bad to abysmal, but it offers such a simple interface and so many pixels for so little money (obviously less if you buy only the panel.) Here are some clever things I"ve discovered:

Will fully operate on as little as 2.0V. That"s power (Vdd) and i/o. It can be driven at 2MHz at these speeds; in fact, the LCD will work at even lower voltages but the contrast fades quickly and your microcontroller will likely approach its lower voltage limit too.

The LCD will work with the chip-select pin (SCE) tied to ground. This means that if it"s the only device on the SPI bus, don"t bother framing the i/o with a chip-select pin. If the bus is shared, frame the entire transaction, not every individual byte you send to the LCD. Interestingly, the display also seems to work fine with a floating Vdd pin - it must draw sufficient power just from i/o via clamping diodes; not surprising when you consider how low-power it is.

The Vout pin: Looks like you don"t have to worry about it on this product, but the bare LCD will generate positive 6-9V on that pin. This wasn"t totally clear to me from reading the datasheet.

(2) The second command byte (the 0xE0 shown above) is not arbitrary. It is 0x80, or"ed together with a 7-bit Vop value. I found my display to be somewhat sensitive to this value. At Vop=0xBF, my unit was initializing electronically, but had a blank display (or solid-black, I can"t remember now.) Anyway, I had to play with this value, and 0xB3 ended up working for me, so if you are initializing to this sequence and having trouble, try varying this parameter. The technical details of this parameter are explained in the datasheet, section 8.9, but really, you will just have to play with it.

(3) I didn"t find reset/init to be all that tricky, but it"s possibly because I"m powering the display unit from a port pin. That"s right, it only draws somewhere around a mA or less, so I just use an output-configured port pin to run the display VDD. (This lets me turn off the display easily when I want to go into low-power Sleep mode on my micro.) So I let my micro do it"s own reset sequence with all my port pins (including Display VDD, !Reset, and !SCE) at "0", and when I"m ready, I set, in sequence:

(4) !SCE tied to ground - yes, you could, but I"ve had fine results framing each byte with the !SCE signal - there"s nothing wrong with that. Yes, framing a whole transaction is fine, too. Note the datasheet timing diagrams show that !SCE serves a reset function on the incoming serial shift register, so if you ever get a glitch in your serial transmission that gets the bit count off, respecting the !SCE timing (whether on byte- or transaction-basis) will automatically get the display controller"s serial receiver synchronized back up on the next byte or transaction.

(5) If you are using a PIC to run ths thing, and using the PIC"s USART or EUSART in a synchronous mode, be sure to note that the LCD controller expects the MSBit of each byte to be transmitted first on the serial line. The PIC 18F EUSART transmits the LSBit first. For now, I have lots of extra code space, so I"ve wasted a 256-byte section on a lookup table that reverses the bits in a byte. This way, I just write my initialization code normally, and I have a TransmitCommandByte() function that looks up every byte it sends so I don"t have to think about that.

Once I get to a final version (or at whatever point I need to conserve code space) I"ll just establish my final command sequencing, and hard-code in the bit-reversed values so I can get rid of that lookup table.

It may be possible to compensate for the low voltage by tweaking the contrast or updating slowly, but in my testing about three years ago journeys beneath 2.0V led to the display whiting slowly out like the face of an inexperienced fighter pilot in an aerobatic manoeuvre.

Thank you! I"m not quite sure I do want an LCD yet, to be honest, I"m just considering the different options available. I"ll check out the Sharp component, thanks!

Advice for others: It took me quite a while to get this working on an ARM Cortex. Since there is no way to read from the LCD, it is very hard to know if SPI is working without doing everything perfectly. SO:

Use the contrast value that Kuy gives (0xE0) or darker - this will cause the display to be all-black so you can confirm it works. THEN you can adjust the value and focus on getting characters to write.

I bought my display from eBay. A dirty cheap bargain from Hong Kong. I must say that it is exactly as the SFE breakout board, but of course, it didn"t work.

The problem I had was solid black display screen. No matter the combination of bias and contrast values that I set. The unit wasn"t totally defective, because under a strong lamp light you could see the display trying to show the letters and pictures that are in the tutorial for Arduino that I got from SFE.

Finally, after a long time of trials, I fixed it--> The problem: the bezel wasn"t tight to the board, so the contacts of the display didn"t work well.

Conclusions: You get what you pay, don"t expect well manufactured products and tested components comming from China at half the price you pay here. And second, it is totally no good idea to start up a new development with new technologies with untrusty material. Maybe you can try some cheap components after you are sure that you are used to certain technology (a display, a sensor, whatever), but don"t try to break the barrier of new knowledge and tricky materials at the same time; because you won"t be able to know who is the faulty.

The problem with these displays, and it seems to be common to all the manufacturers, is that the PCB material is too thin. After a month or two, the board slowly bows away from the glass display panel under pressure from the conductive rubber connector strip. Pressing on the top centre of the metal part of the display makes it work again, but only temporarily.

If the LCD module is soldered to another board and the two top screws installed and tightened carefully to pull the bow out of the module it seems to prevent (or solve) the problem.

The only real fix for this display is to redesign the metal cover with a hold-down tag in the top centre, or make it with a thicker PCB that doesn"t bow under pressure from the connector. Until that happens I won"t be buying any more.

The Arduino code works fine for me, but I can"t make any thing work with Pic. I found this code at http://www.sunbizhosting.com/~spiral/ , but can"t figure out what I"m doing wrong.

I"m using voltage dividers to supply 3V in the inputs of the LCD, because of the Arduino works in 5V. LCD Vcc and LED are powered from the 3.3V output of the Arduino. The LCD only displayed something when I used: R1=470K,R2=820K. I have tried several values to obtain 3V, but the LCD showed nothing. I don"t understand that.

You"ll want to put a command byte of 0x20 in there, after the 0x14, and before the 0x0C. This is needed to put the display back into its "basic" command set, so it will correctly recognize the 0x0C command byte that puts it into "normal" (not inverse) display mode.

I"m interfacing this LCD with ATMEGA 32. Its been more than a week that I"ve been trying to get it right. All I get is the LED dimming effect. Here is my initialization code..CE=1;

Has anyone played around with minimum and maximum SPI clock rates with this display? I know the datasheet says up to 4 Mbit/s, but assuming this display is the only thing on the particular SPI bus, what"s a good minimum clock rate before you might start to notice delay in the display refresh? I mean TVs are 60 Hz - 120Hz.

I have a similar board made by mib-instruments and bought from ebay years ago. It has been my standard spi test tool because it"s so easy to work with. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nokia-5110-LCD-84x84-dot-martix-backlight-PCB-RED-/320684678723 (specs http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k636/mib_instruments/diy/LCDC2A0SPEC.jpg)

These LCD"s need cleaning. I have an average failure rate of about 15-20% on delivery. The most common problem is that the contrast is too high, and there"s constant flickering / changing of contrast compared to the other 80% of them.

The solution is fairly simple, unclip the LCD from it"s board and clean the pads on the PCB with 99% IPA. Then remove the lcd back plate and contact bar. Sometimes the contact bar is stuck fairly well to the glass, peel off carefully. Clean the contacts on the LCD glass with IPA, if any residue from the contacts is left on, rub it off carefully with IPA / tissue.

I love this little display! I wanted to be able to create images for it but nothing I saw did exactly what I wanted. So I wrote a processing sketch that creates 84x48 squares on the screen and allows you to click to turn them on or off. Also has buttons to invert, move up/down/left/right, and flip horizontally/vertically. Then, it saves the hex data to a text file to copy to your code. You can also load an image (any size, any colors) and it will scale it, convert to b/w, then put it in the rest of the program so that you can alter the pixels or move it. It isn"t perfect for every occasion but I"ve found it useful and I hope others might too. It is heavily commented so it should be easy to figure things out and change them if you want something different. http://thewanderingengineer.com/2014/07/12/nokia-5110-screen-photo-to-bitmap-converter/

I"ve got 3 of these and wired them up as suggested in the hookup guide and downloaded the example code, and the only thing that seems to work is brightening and dimming the LED. I"ve started again from scratch at least twice, tried all 3 units, and verified all the connections match the hookup guide, and I still the ssame result; no graphics, no text, just a border. Any ideas as to what might be wrong?

Never mind, I had no problem running it at 5V directly from the Arduino with the contrast value bumped up to 45 or above. With 10K ohm resistors on the control lines as shown in the sample hookup, I get a blank screen. Also removing the backslash from the sample code got garbage characters, so I left it in.

Anyone taken these things apart yet? You know the flexible rectangular blocky thing that connects the contact pad on the board to the LCD itself? What are these called?

Got mine running last night and found two problems with the code, one of which was the backslash a couple of others have already noted. Second was that the LCDCharacter() writes two blank vertical lines, one before the character and a second after, when only one is needed. Without the extra blank you get at least one additional character on each line. I"ll probably also move the ASCII font table to PROGMEM space to save on RAM and then start to work on some big digits for a clock.

I"m using this LCD for a large Arduino UNO project, but I"m running out of SRAM memory space. I was wondering if I used PROGMEM on the LCD ASCII array if that would help. If so, does anyone know what the right code for this would be? After looking through a lot of PROGMEM examples, I"m not advance enough to really grasp everything that"s going on. Any help you can give would be a great help. Thanks in advance!

I used one of these LCDs with an Arduino to display GPS information. I wrote a few functions that can display large numbers (28 px high) if anyone is interested, this lets me display speed, heading etc. A writeup of my project is here: http://mechinations.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/gps-sailing/

These are great displays. I ran into a problem using them with the nRF24L01+ radio transciever, which requires the use of the SPI bus. If one attaches both the radio and the display MOSI and SCK pins to pins 13 and 11 as instructed in the hookup guide, the SPI traffic of the other device (in this case the nRF24L01+ radio) will prevent the display from functioning. The easy solution is to move the Nokia 5110 MOSI and SCK pins to any other digital pin. This should be made clear in the hookup guide, where it says there is no choice but to use the hardware SPI pins for the display. I found out that is not true at all. I hope his helps others with the same problem. Despite the occasional bad display these carry much more information that the comparably prices 16 x 2 LCD and use fewer pins too boot. What a deal!

Hello people, is there anyone that can tell me the height of this display. I mean the displays height 45x45 mm is the size but i wonder the thickness of it. Only the display not the pcb. I couldn"t find this info on the datasheet. Best Regards..

This is a great display for the money, certainly the best bang for the buck of you can live with B&W and lower res graphics. I have a lcd driver for Arduino I will post on http://www.marchdvd.com/5110 so take a look there it draws text aligned on pixels boundaries of 8 and draws lines and has invert video options.

I just started messing around with this LCD using a STM32F103 microcontroller running at 72MHz... it works great. The only problem I had, and I suspect others might have if they are using fast processors, is that you have to deliberately introduce the setup and hold time delays on the DC pin... if you don"t you will get spurious pixels written to the display. I used a delay of 10uS, although the spec says 100nS is fine.

I been trying to display 8-10 images as an animation. The individual images all work, but when I trey more than 8 images, nothing happens on the screen, and above 2 images, I get errors in the drawing of the images. Is there some kind of buffer or violent reset I can do so that the data doesnt get jumbled up?

Can someone help me edit the code in the arduino example to display readings from a sensor, I"ve looked through all of the links and searched through the Internet but I couldn"t find an example anywhere, it would really help me if someone could tell me how to do this.

Has someone already been able to get this display to work with an Arduino Due? For some reason I cannot get it to work while it does work perfectly on my Mega. Any ideas why it may not work?

Added a driver for this display to the object-oriented arduino platform; Cosa. Please find example code at https://github.com/mikaelpatel/Cosa/blob/master/examples/Drivers/CosaPCD8544/CosaPCD8544.ino and source code at https://github.com/mikaelpatel/Cosa/blob/master/Cosa/IOStream/Driver/PCD8544.hh.

This driver supports iostream output with form feed, new line and backspace. It also supports drawing of icons and histogram bars. See the example code.

I just spent the last couple hours struggling with this LCD because of something very stupid of me. I was using an atmega328p in AVR-GCC and using hardware SPI. Thinking i didn"t need MISO I hooked it to DC. The LCD worked absolutely fine until I tried to set the x and y position in the ram. It started acting weird every time I tried it. Finally I put dc to another pin and BAM NO PROBLEMS. Looking back I feel pretty stupid but hopefully this post will save someone else the same mistake. Other than that great LCD for my projects

I used the ASCII font given in the example code in one of my projects and ran across a mystifying bug. I was developing code on a PIC12F675 to drive an OLED through its SPI interface. (Yes there are enough pins and memory to do this!) I was using the HI_TECH C compiler and tried several different approaches and never could get the "]" character to display. After pulling what is left of my hair out for 2 days, I realized there was a "\" in the comment for the previous line of the ASCII font definition which caused the compiler to treat the array entry for ] as a comment! Just replace the "// 5c \" comment with "//5c backslash" and everything works! I don"t know if this effect is peculiar to the HI-TECH compiler only.

The Energia folks have an example program for this LCD and the TI Launchpad written using their Arduino style tooling. I"ve updated their example and added the ability to report back the temperature over a UART. It is a very simple hardware setup since both systems are 3.3v. http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2012/08/digital-thermometer-with-ti-lanchpad.html

1) There seems to be a serious issue related to contrast and/or connections between the display and the breakout board. When running "Black on White" text, the background gradually darkens to a black rectangle covering the etire display area but will revert to normal if the centre of the metal surround is squeezed towards the pcb, however, putting a sprig clip on it to keep it comoressed doesn"t seem to cure the problem, but just slows the raste at which it fails - waggle it and it comes good again.

2) I"m really struggling to find unformation on using this display with the Arduino. The example (pcdtest.pde) provided with the Adafruit libraries (Adafruit_PCD8544 and Adafruit_GFX) won"t even compile and the only library I have found that I can make any sense of using is the PCD8544 library from Google (http://code.google.com/p/pcd8544/downloads/detail?name=PCD8544-1.4.zip) and I can"t really uderstand how to do graphics with that.

I tried using the "LCDAssistant" package to create a logo from a graphic that I resized to a b&w jpg of 84x48 but every byte generated was 0x00 so that was not right. I tried fiddling with the settings (flying blind) but still got nowhere - does anybody know the settings for LCDAssistant and this display and has used it successfully?

Hi - for some reason (way above my "new to s/w" head) the code hates the \ character, even in comments. If you take out the backslash in the character definition section it works. My tweak is:

One of the things that I test regularly is a commercial item that features a 16x4 (HD44780) display. Currently I have a 20x4 on a flying lead that I plug in to determine if a display failure is down the lcd display or the main board.

Is there any way to get the 5110 Graphic Display to work with signals that were feeding to an HD44780? - if I could build that in then I would have a complete multi-testing set up in one box.

I have the other test functions working ok by using the library and cobbling together code from projects I"ve found on the web (very inefficent coding when put together I"m sure, but it works) but I"d dearly love to add this extra functionality.

I only had a little problem showing lower case chars when using the example code but it seemed to be a problem with the comment "// 5c \". Once the backslash was removed everything was working as expected.

Might I suggest you (SFE) source some of the Electronic Assembly"s LCD Dog-S series. I think they would be a step up from these at a reduced price. I don"t think that they website is up to date, but their part number is LED39x41-GR.

I just got 2 of these. Haven"t had a chance to hook them up yet. But I gather that the LEDs are green. Has anyone managed to lift up the display and change the LEDs for white or other color?

I made a little font generator for the Nokia 5110 in the processing programming language (processing.org). It allows you to convert any font and any character that you can display on the screen into a list of hex codes that can be directly used in an embedded system (I"m using msp430). Just type a character and the corresponding hex codes will be in your clipboard and you can copy them into your program. It starts with an example with the chinese character for 5. It should work on any system that can run processing (e.g. mac osx).

I am guessing that you are seeing the PCB bent away from the back of the display, up near the "top" of the display region, when it is viewed in normal operation, right?

This is because this is where the connections are on the back of the "display glass". These connections are carried down into the PCB via a small strip of that elastomeric connector material. This material works by being compressed between the two substrates (the glass and the PCB) to hold it in place and make the connections between the pads on each surface. As a result of being compressed, it puts a force "up" on the glass, and "down" onto the PCB. In this particular design, this has the result of bowing the PCB in the units I have purchased.

I finally got around to running this LCD on my 3310 PCB. It is working fine with one minor problem. The SF 3310 display hides to first line of bytes for some reason and I had to offset everything to compensate. The 5110 doesn"t do this as behaves as expected. I haven"t heard anyone else report this so maybe my initialization code is different.

Using a 3V source, my LCD often worked OK using bias 0x14 like the other examples, but sometimes it would appear gray and faded. The fading would lessen if I touched the panel lightly with my hand for a few seconds, then let go, so maybe it"s a temperature-dependent thing?

Ack! After two days of working nicely with 0x15 bias, I reset the board today, and the LCD appeared way over-dark. I changed the bias back to 0x14 and it looks perfect. What the heck?! I think there must be some temperature-sensing or temperature-dependence going on, so the same init values may produce good-looking results one day but not the next.

Does anyone know whether this can be stripped of its backing so it can be used in transmission? I would love to use this as a modulator for a laser beam. Or if someone knows a similarly cheap transmission LCD that would be fine too.

For those of the arduino persuasion, I wrapped some simple methods up in a library based on this arduino page http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/PCD8544.

Stuck. Blank LCD. Added 0x20, changed Vop to 0xB3. Guessing connections may be the issue? 3.3v for LED and VCC. GND to GND. Remainder connected to Arduino via voltage dividers. What am I doing wrong?

This is a great little lcd. When I first wired it up, the backlight was shorted (accidentally) against my 5v rail, so i got some magic smoke, and burnt to LEDs but it re-soldered the offending joints and it works very well now. Something to note: the refresh and write times are much, much slower if you use 5 volt logic. I stuck in a logic level converter and it ran at least 5x faster.

I did the same thing (see my comment above), but I still can"t seem to get anything to display. 3 of the 4 backlight LEDs still light up when I give them power, but I"m wondering what joints you re-soldered to get it to work again.

You can also use FastLCD to convert your bitmaps - google it. It outputs BASIC code, but you just search and replace &h to 0x and you"re grand. It has the added advantage of being an editor for touching up output.

I recently obtained a virtually identical LCD from a Nokia 5160, and although its backlight LEDs are green, not white and conversely use different voltages, I had success hooking up the LEDs" Vcc pin to a PWM capable pin on the microcontroller, allowing me to control backlight intensity (I didn"t need a current limiting resistor for this either, but adding one will help reduce current drain on the controller).

Seems like the PCD8544 library does it"s own SPI bit managing and it really doesn"t like me using the SD library (also talks SPI) at the same time. I"ve made sure I"ve got all the SPI pins matching for both libraries (MISO, MOSI, Clock are the same and each device has it"s own Select), but it looks like the SD.begin() call just breaks the SPI bus for the 5110 and it becomes non-responsive. The LCD works just fine if I don"t initialize the SD library and the SD card works fine if I do initialize the SD card.

I"m pretty sure I tracked down the problem- the PCD8544 library uses software SPI while the SD library uses hardware SPI and I"m pretty sure the Arduino can"t do both over the same SPI clock/miso/mosi pins. Anyone know if this LCD will work with hardware SPI?

I accidentally (well, intentionally, but stupidly) plugged the LED backlight line directly into 5V when I first got this, and I saw (and smelled) the magic black smoke escape. I believe the black smoke only came from one of the backlight LEDs burning out, because I only notice one of them not working now. The other backlight LEDs still light up okay, but I also now seem to be having trouble getting the display to show anything. I"m just wondering if I could have messed anything else up. It seems like others have had their issues with this display, so I was hoping I maybe had something misconfigured. I"m fairly certain I have the pins assigned properly, but maybe I"ll tinker with the contrast. Any recommendations for setting the contrast value?

I"ve had issues with the LCD not showing anything intermittently. You got to make sure that all the connections are secure, and for the reset pulse, be sure to have a delay that"s 30-50 milliseconds long.

As much as I love SFE products and will continue to order from them, this is one product I would not recommend. The connection between the LCD unit itself and the carrier board is via those rubber polymer connectors. All the planets must line up properly for them to work. In this case, the carrier board was warped preventing the connection from working. You will find other such remarks in the comments area.

Out of curiosity - what indication is it giving you that it is powering up, if there is nothing on the display? There are no outputs brought out from the controller, so what feedback are you seeing that leads you to believe it is powering up?

I"ve followed the linked-to Arduino example and I get nothing on the display. Should it just work without any other components? The link mentions a possible cap on VOUT but there"s no such pin. Googling has suggested my Duemilanove"s digital pins will be @5V but I need 3.3V?

I have mine working now! The secret was oz-solutions"s linked-to observation about the second code example which does more initialisation. I suspect that the default contrast etc makes the screen blank.

Don"t do this. Each divider will be burning 20x the entire amount of current that the display needs to function, and the whole assembly will waste 100x the LCD"s needed power and many, many times more than even the atmega needs to run at full speed. This will kill battery life.

Hi, I just bought this wonderful LCD but I"m having huge huge problems connecting it..could anyone please point me in the right direction? Since there are pins that aren"t metioned in the code, for example the 6 - DNK(MOSI)...

Does anyone know the diode rating and package size, also does anyone know where to get the rubber ferroius connector behind the LCD mine is defective. Has anyone come into issues with the breadboard the LCD is connected to, a few aren"t working for me.

Yes, we have noticed that the PCB was bowing and as a result the LCD now only works when we press down on the metal strip at the top. I hope that only a small number of these LCDs have this problem. We"re expecting a shipment to arrive today, I will be running more tests.

Edit: After leaving glue to dry overnight, LCD simply does not turn on anymore. All the connections are good, but absolutely nothing shows on the LCD now at all. Only the LEDs come on.

Did you get either of the LCDs to display anything, at any time? Is it possible that the connections were OK, but you were not initializing or driving them correctly? Or did they start to work at one point, and then fail at some later point?

When I originally tried to get mine working, I was seeing NOTHING on the display. Then I had to get my initialization sequence correct, and adjusted my Vop value (ultimately using a byte of 0xB3) before the screen would display anything visible at all.

Note that the backlight LED"s are soldered onto the breakout board, and have nothing to do with the circuitry of the controller and LCD. So just because the backlights are shining doesn"t tell you anything about the operability of the LCD itself.

I have two display boards that both work, but I do see the bowing along the "top" edge of the metal bracket. I haven"t taken one apart yet, but I assume this is the edge nearest the elastomeric strip, which is creating this bowing force.

It depends on the code that you are using to control the LCD. If you are using the Arduino example above, the pins are defined in the beginning of the code.

FWIW I have connected this LCD with a 5V power supply to a 5V Arduino board with no level conversion and it worked. Presumably this may reduce the lifetime of the LCD.

I am attempting to use this with a Duemilanove (ATmega328). Up til now, I have been powering it with the 3.3V line, including the LED. The datasheet for the LDC claims: "VDDmax = 5 V if LCD supply voltage is internally generated (voltage generator enabled)." The logic levels should be kept from 2.7V to 3.3V. Since the Duemilanove uses 5V logic levels, I am using a simple voltage divider on the communication line with no issues.

The maximum logic value of 3.3 volts made me cautious of driving the LCDs at the native 5 volts of my Teensy AVR. That said, running purely off 5 volts seems to do no harm to the LCD.

For those interested, I have taken a few measurements of the current draw of the LED backlight of my LCD. As I said earlier, powering the LED with 5V external has caused permanent damage to one, perhaps two of the four LEDs. So, use the following graph at your own risk.

I made some changes/additions to the example code linked above. The main addition is a function that makes it easy to turn individual pixels on/off.

Is there any more documentation available for the additions to the LCD? For example, the datasheet has no information (that I could find, at least) on the LED. Everything seems fine on 3.3V, but what is the current limit on the LED? (note: if it wasn"t for work, I would just mess around with it myself.)

If you want to wire up several up these to a single microcontroller, you might take advantage of my freshly GPL"d C++ driver library for PCD8544 devices. It"s templated, so you can avoid duplicating code all over the place. Here"s a picture of two PCD8544 screens running off of an ATmega328. (The screens are operating independently, even though they happen to be showing the same logo graphic in that picture.)

Here is a PicBasic Pro example for the 3310, which should be compatible with the 5110. http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/content.php?r=174-Using-Nokia-3310-LCD

Fantastic! It appears from your example link that this uses the same controller as the Nokia 3310 that I"ve already used in past projects. The only thing that made it so cumbersome was trying to connect to its fine pitch press on type connector. This gives me a great low cost display option that is easy to connect to.

If anyone doesn"t have experience with this LCD, take a peak at the Arduino example link above to see just how easy it is to use. If you use plain C on your AVRs, I have sample code on http://tinkerish.com.