arduino projects with lcd screen in stock

Adding a display to your Arduino can serve many purposes. Since a common use for microcontrollers is reading data from sensors, a display allows you to see this data in real-time without needing to use the serial monitor within the Arduino IDE. It also allows you to give your projects a personal touch with text, images, or even interactivity through a touch screen.

Transparent Organic Light Emitting Diode (TOLED) is a type of LED that, as you can guess, has a transparent screen. It builds on the now common OLED screens found in smartphones and TVs, but with a transparent display, offers up some new possibilities for Arduino screens.

Take for example this brilliant project that makes use of TOLED displays. By stacking 10 transparent OLED screens in parallel, creator Sean Hodgins has converted a handful of 2D screens into a solid-state volumetric display. This kind of display creates an image that has 3-dimensional depth, taking us one step closer to the neon, holographic screens we imagine in the future.

Crystalfontz has a tiny monochrome (light blue) 1.51" TOLED that has 128x56 pixels. As the technology is more recent than the following displays in this list, the cost is higher too. One of these screens can be purchased for around $26, but for certain applications, it might just be worth it.

The liquid crystal display (LCD) is the most common display to find in DIY projects and home appliances alike. This is no surprise as they are simple to operate, low-powered, and incredibly cheap.

This type of display can vary in design. Some are larger, with more character spaces and rows; some come with a backlight. Most attach directly to the board through 8 or 12 connections to the Arduino pins, making them incompatible with boards with fewer pins available. In this instance, buy a screen with an I2C adapter, allowing control using only four pins.

Available for only a few dollars (or as little as a couple of dollars on AliExpress with included I2C adapter), these simple displays can be used to give real-time feedback to any project.

The screens are capable of a large variety of preset characters which cover most use cases in a variety of languages. You can control your LCD using the Liquid Crystal Library provided by Arduino. The display() and noDisplay() methods write to the LCD, as shown in the official tutorial on the Arduino website.

Are you looking for something simple to display numbers and a few basic characters? Maybe you are looking for something with that old-school arcade feel? A seven-segment display might suit your needs.

These simple boards are made up of 7 LEDs (8 if you include the dot), and work much like normal LEDs with a common Anode or Cathode connection. This allows them to take one connection to V+ (or GND for common cathode) and be controlled from the pins of your Arduino. By combining these pins in code, you can create numbers and several letters, along with more abstract designs—anything you can dream up using the segments available!

These tiny LCD screens are monochrome and have a screen size of 84 x 48 pixels, but don"t let that fool you. Coming in at around $2 on AliExpress, these displays are incredibly cheap and usually come with a backlight as standard.

Depending on which library you use, the screen can display multiple lines of text in various fonts. It"s also capable of displaying images, and there is free software designed to help get your creations on screen. While the refresh rate is too slow for detailed animations, these screens are hardy enough to be included in long-term, always-on projects.

For a step up in resolution and functionality, an OLED display might be what you are looking for. At first glance, these screens look similar to the 5110 screens, but they are a significant upgrade. The standard 0.96" screens are 128 x 64 monochrome, and come with a backlight as standard.

They connect to your Arduino using I2C, meaning that alongside the V+ and GND pins, only two further pins are required to communicate with the screen. With various sizes and full color options available, these displays are incredibly versatile.

For a project to get you started with OLED displays, our Electronic D20 build will teach you everything you need to know -- and you"ll end up with the ultimate geeky digital dice for your gaming sessions!

These displays can be used in the same way as the others we have mentioned so far, but their refresh rate allows for much more ambitious projects. The basic monochrome screen is available on Amazon.

Thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT LCDs) are in many ways another step up in quality when it comes to options for adding a screen to your Arduino. Available with or without touchscreen functionality, they also add the ability to load bitmap files from an on-board microSD card slot.

Arduino have an official guide for setting up their non-touchscreen TFT LCD screen. For a video tutorial teaching you the basics of setting up the touchscreen version, YouTuber educ8s.tv has you covered:

With the touchscreen editions of these screens costing less than $10 on AliExpress, these displays are another great choice for when you need a nice-looking display for your project.

Looking for something a little different? An E-paper (or E-ink depending on who you ask) display might be right for you. These screens differ from the others giving a much more natural reading experience, it is no surprise that this technology is the cornerstone of almost every e-reader available.

The reason these displays look so good is down to the way they function. Each "pixel" contains charged particles between two electrodes. By switching the charge of each electrode, you can influence the negatively charged black particles to swap places with the positively charged white particles.

This article has covered most options available for Arduino displays, though there are definitely more weird and wonderful ways to add feedback to your DIY devices.

Now that you have an idea of what is out there, why not incorporate a screen into your DIY smart home setup? If retro gaming is more your thing, why not create some retro games on Arduino?

Follow the sketch below to connect the part together. Make sure the connections are right before powering up the project. A bad connection can easily damage the LCD.

There are 4 pins of the LCD we are not using, those pins are used to read data coming from the LCD which is not needed for this project. We are only using the LCD to write on, nothing more.

The Potentiometer is used to control the contrast of the LCD. In some case, you might need to rotate the potentiometer handle to see anything appearing on the LCD.

When you are done connecting everything, you can upload the following code to the Arduino. But before doing that you need to add the Adafruit_LiquidCrystal.h to your code. To do so, simply navigate to the library manager, search for LCD and it will be right there. Click on it to add it.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen is an electronic display module and find a wide range of applications. A 16x2 LCD display is very basic module and is very commonly used in various devices and circuits. These modules are preferred over seven segments and other multi segment LEDs. The reasons being: LCDs are economical; easily programmable; have no limitation of displaying special & even custom characters (unlike in seven segments), animations and so on.

A 16x2 LCD means it can display 16 characters per line and there are 2 such lines. In this LCD each character is displayed in 5x7 pixel matrix. This LCD has two registers, namely, Command and Data.

Arduino Powered Binary Clock: We can design a binary clock by using Arduino. This project needs simple electronic elements like LEDs. The LEDs are arranged in a sequence to display the analog clock.

Arduino Powered Lucky Cat As Physical Webcounter: This project is used to make indicate us when person visits our web page or web site. The lucky cat idol will make us to know this by connecting this to the web server by using Arduino. This project uses the simple hardware components like LED and servo motors.

Arduino Powered Mobile Phone: The cell phone can charge the Arduino by using its Li ion battery. This Arduino powered mobile phone project will be useful for charging applications, by using simple elements like diodes and resisters.

Arduino Room Temperature Monitor: This project will help us to monitor the temperature of a room by using a thermostat and Arduino. We can monitor the temperature by using a http server api and can send text messages about the temperature and room conditions.

Arduino shields allow you to quickly upgrade your projects with a wide array of useful features and tools that you can plug directly into your board. To show you how easy it is, we’ll walk through how to add a programmable LCD display to your Arduino project so you can display text, and provide input with a series of buttons.

We’ve talked a bit about Arduino shields before, but if you’re not familiar, a shield is an add-on for an Arduino project that can plug directly into your board to give it new features. Some are stackable, so you can add multiple modules to a single project. They often come with their own library of software that you can import into your sketches to control them just as easily as you do with other components you connect.

For this guide, we’ll be using an LCD display shield. There are several variations of this kind of shield out there, but the one we’ll be using isthe 1602 keypad shield, which can display up to 16 characters across 2 rows (hence 1602) for up to 32 characters at a time. It also comes with six buttons: four directional buttons (left, right, up, and down) and a select and reset button.

This shield has 28 pins that align with the pins on the Arduino Uno. Shields are generally designed to snap directly onto their corresponding boards, so if you have a shield that doesn’t match the pins on your board, you might need a different shield. In this case, if you have an Arduino Uno and the correct shield, you can insert the shield directly onto the board itself (we’ll talk more about this in the wiring section below).

However, the LCD display doesn’t need to use every pin on the board. This is where some pass-through pins come in handy. You can connect wires to the LCD display board where there are open contacts, and this will connect to the Arduino. This is handy because it means you don’t lose any open pins just because you’re using a shield.

The final piece that makes this work is the LiquidCrystal library. This library provides simple commands to display text, scroll text, control a cursor position, and more. As long as your LCD display shield is compatible with this library (and most popular shields are), then you can include this library and control your display with very simple commands.

Since shields plug directly into Arduino boards, you won’t need a ton for this project. That’s what makes Arduino shields great; they can dramatically simplify your projects. However, you still need a couple of things before we get started:

The Arduino IDE comes with a few sketches in the example book underFile > Examples > Liquid Crystal. For our purposes, we’ll use the HelloWorld sketch. You can load this up in your IDE, but we’ll include the full code below:

Next, these two lines will initialize variables for the six pins that are needed to control the LCD display in 4-bit mode: rs, enable, d4, d5, d6, and d7. The Arduino documentation has more information on the pins required to control the LCD display in 8-bit mode, but we won’t need that here.

The second line will assign those pins (via the variables you just created) to a new type of variable called LiquidCrystal, in this case named lcd. This lets you address the LCD display as a whole entity, rather than having to control each individual pin. This lets you use the other commands in the LiquidCrystal library with simple lines of code.

In the setup() section, there are only two commands: the first, lcd.begin()—which calls thebegin() command on the lcd variable we created earlier—initializes the LCD display. The second prints the phrase “hello, world!”

This print() command is different from the one you’ve used in the past. While the other, Serial.print(), prints data to the serial port, this one is part of the LiquidCrystal library and will print text to an LCD display. It can be called on any LCD object you create using the above method.

If you’re only using the shield, you won’t need any special wiring at all for this project. Simply align the pins on the bottom of your LCD shield with the pins on your Arduino Uno board. It’s recommended to start with the pins that align with A0 and RX0 on the far end of the Arduino board.

On the LCD shield itself, you’ll see many pins have empty contacts next to the solder points where the pins connect to the shield. If you want to add additional wires or components, this is where you can do so.

Do you want your Arduino projects to display status messages or sensor readings? Then these LCD displays can be a perfect fit. They are extremely common and fast way to add a readable interface to your project.

This tutorial will help you get up and running with not only 16×2 Character LCD, but any Character LCD (16×4, 16×1, 20×4 etc.) that is based on Hitachi’s LCD Controller Chip – HD44780.

When current is applied to these crystals, they become opaque, blocking the backlight that resides behind the screen. As a result that particular area will be dark compared to the others. And this is how the characters are displayed on the screen.

True to their name, these LCDs are ideal for displaying only text/characters. A 16×2 character LCD, for example, has an LED backlight and can display 32 ASCII characters in two rows of 16 characters each.

The good news is that all of these displays are ‘swappable’, which means if you build your project with one you can just unplug it and use another size/color LCD of your choice. Your code will have to change a bit but at least the wiring remains the same!

Vo (LCD Contrast) controls the contrast and brightness of the LCD. Using a simple voltage divider with a potentiometer, we can make fine adjustments to the contrast.

RS (Register Select) pin is set to LOW when sending commands to the LCD (such as setting the cursor to a specific location, clearing the display, etc.) and HIGH when sending data to the LCD. Basically this pin is used to separate the command from the data.

R/W (Read/Write) pin allows you to read data from the LCD or write data to the LCD. Since we are only using this LCD as an output device, we are going to set this pin LOW. This forces it into WRITE mode.

E (Enable) pin is used to enable the display. When this pin is set to LOW, the LCD does not care what is happening on the R/W, RS, and data bus lines. When this pin is set to HIGH, the LCD processes the incoming data.

Now we will power the LCD. The LCD has two separate power connections; One for the LCD (pin 1 and pin 2) and the other for the LCD backlight (pin 15 and pin 16). Connect pins 1 and 16 of the LCD to GND and 2 and 15 to 5V.

Most LCDs have a built-in series resistor for the LED backlight. You’ll find this near pin 15 on the back of the LCD. If your LCD does not include such a resistor or you are not sure if your LCD has one, you will need to add one between 5V and pin 15. It is safe to use a 220 ohm resistor, although a value this high may make the backlight a bit dim. For better results you can check the datasheet for maximum backlight current and select a suitable resistor value.

Next we will make the connection for pin 3 on the LCD which controls the contrast and brightness of the display. To adjust the contrast we will connect a 10K potentiometer between 5V and GND and connect the potentiometer’s center pin (wiper) to pin 3 on the LCD.

That’s it. Now turn on the Arduino. You will see the backlight lit up. Now as you turn the knob on the potentiometer, you will start to see the first row of rectangles. If that happens, Congratulations! Your LCD is working fine.

Let’s finish connecting the LCD to the Arduino. We have already made the connections to power the LCD, now all we have to do is make the necessary connections for communication.

We know that there are 8 data pins that carry data to the display. However, HD44780 based LCDs are designed in such a way that we can communicate with the LCD using only 4 data pins (4-bit mode) instead of 8 (8-bit mode). This saves us 4 pins!

The sketch begins by including the LiquidCrystal library. The Arduino community has a library called LiquidCrystal which makes programming of LCD modules less difficult. You can find more information about the library on Arduino’s official website.

First we create a LiquidCrystal object. This object uses 6 parameters and specifies which Arduino pins are connected to the LCD’s RS, EN, and four data pins.

In the ‘setup’ we call two functions. The first function is begin(). It is used to specify the dimensions (number of columns and rows) of the display. If you are using a 16×2 character LCD, pass the 16 and 2; If you’re using a 20×4 LCD, pass 20 and 4. You got the point!

After that we set the cursor position to the second row by calling the function setCursor(). The cursor position specifies the location where you want the new text to be displayed on the LCD. The upper left corner is assumed to be col=0, row=0.

There are some useful functions you can use with LiquidCrystal objects. Some of them are listed below:lcd.home() function is used to position the cursor in the upper-left of the LCD without clearing the display.

lcd.scrollDisplayRight() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the right. If you want the text to scroll continuously, you have to use this function inside a for loop.

lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the left. Similar to above function, use this inside a for loop for continuous scrolling.

If you find the characters on the display dull and boring, you can create your own custom characters (glyphs) and symbols for your LCD. They are extremely useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.

As discussed earlier in this tutorial a character is made up of a 5×8 pixel matrix, so you need to define your custom character within that matrix. You can use the createChar() function to define a character.

CGROM is used to store all permanent fonts that are displayed using their ASCII codes. For example, if we send 0x41 to the LCD, the letter ‘A’ will be printed on the display.

CGRAM is another memory used to store user defined characters. This RAM is limited to 64 bytes. For a 5×8 pixel based LCD, only 8 user-defined characters can be stored in CGRAM. And for 5×10 pixel based LCD only 4 user-defined characters can be stored.

Creating custom characters has never been easier! We have created a small application called Custom Character Generator. Can you see the blue grid below? You can click on any 5×8 pixel to set/clear that particular pixel. And as you click, the code for the character is generated next to the grid. This code can be used directly in your Arduino sketch.

In this Arduino tutorial we will learn how to connect and use an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)with Arduino. LCD displays like these are very popular and broadly used in many electronics projects because they are great for displaying simple information, like sensors data, while being very affordable.

You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below. It includes everything you need to know about using an LCD character display with Arduino, such as, LCD pinout, wiring diagram and several example codes.

An LCD character display is a unique type of display that can only output individual ASCII characters with fixed size. Using these individual characters then we can form a text.

If we take a closer look at the display we can notice that there are small rectangular areas composed of 5×8 pixels grid. Each pixel can light up individually, and so we can generate characters within each grid.

The number of the rectangular areas define the size of the LCD. The most popular LCD is the 16×2 LCD, which has two rows with 16 rectangular areas or characters. Of course, there are other sizes like 16×1, 16×4, 20×4 and so on, but they all work on the same principle. Also, these LCDs can have different background and text color.

It has 16 pins and the first one from left to right is the Groundpin. The second pin is the VCCwhich we connect the 5 volts pin on the Arduino Board. Next is the Vo pin on which we can attach a potentiometer for controlling the contrast of the display.

Next, The RSpin or register select pin is used for selecting whether we will send commands or data to the LCD. For example if the RS pin is set on low state or zero volts, then we are sending commands to the LCD like: set the cursor to a specific location, clear the display, turn off the display and so on. And when RS pin is set on High state or 5 volts we are sending data or characters to the LCD.

Next comes the R/W pin which selects the mode whether we will read or write to the LCD. Here the write mode is obvious and it is used for writing or sending commands and data to the LCD. The read mode is used by the LCD itself when executing the program which we don’t have a need to discuss about it in this tutorial.

After all we don’t have to worry much about how the LCD works, as the Liquid Crystal Library takes care for almost everything. From the Arduino’s official website you can find and see the functions of the library which enable easy use of the LCD. We can use the Library in 4 or 8 bit mode. In this tutorial we will use it in 4 bit mode, or we will just use 4 of the 8 data pins.

We will use just 6 digital input pins from the Arduino Board. The LCD’s registers from D4 to D7 will be connected to Arduino’s digital pins from 4 to 7. The Enable pin will be connected to pin number 2 and the RS pin will be connected to pin number 1. The R/W pin will be connected to Ground and theVo pin will be connected to the potentiometer middle pin.

We can adjust the contrast of the LCD by adjusting the voltage input at the Vo pin. We are using a potentiometer because in that way we can easily fine tune the contrast, by adjusting input voltage from 0 to 5V.

Yes, in case we don’t have a potentiometer, we can still adjust the LCD contrast by using a voltage divider made out of two resistors. Using the voltage divider we need to set the voltage value between 0 and 5V in order to get a good contrast on the display. I found that voltage of around 1V worked worked great for my LCD. I used 1K and 220 ohm resistor to get a good contrast.

There’s also another way of adjusting the LCD contrast, and that’s by supplying a PWM signal from the Arduino to the Vo pin of the LCD. We can connect the Vo pin to any Arduino PWM capable pin, and in the setup section, we can use the following line of code:

It will generate PWM signal at pin D11, with value of 100 out of 255, which translated into voltage from 0 to 5V, it will be around 2V input at the Vo LCD pin.

First thing we need to do is it insert the Liquid Crystal Library. We can do that like this: Sketch > Include Library > Liquid Crystal. Then we have to create an LC object. The parameters of this object should be the numbers of the Digital Input pins of the Arduino Board respectively to the LCD’s pins as follow: (RS, Enable, D4, D5, D6, D7). In the setup we have to initialize the interface to the LCD and specify the dimensions of the display using the begin()function.

The cursor() function is used for displaying underscore cursor and the noCursor() function for turning off. Using the clear() function we can clear the LCD screen.

In case we have a text with length greater than 16 characters, we can scroll the text using the scrollDisplayLeft() orscrollDisplayRight() function from the LiquidCrystal library.

We can choose whether the text will scroll left or right, using the scrollDisplayLeft() orscrollDisplayRight() functions. With the delay() function we can set the scrolling speed.

So, we have covered pretty much everything we need to know about using an LCD with Arduino. These LCD Character displays are really handy for displaying information for many electronics project. In the examples above I used 16×2 LCD, but the same working principle applies for any other size of these character displays.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. Feel free to ask any question in the comments section below and don’t forget to check out my full collection of 30+ Arduino Projects.

Combining pushbuttons with LCDs can go a long way when making Arduino projects. Take a vending machine for example. A vending machine works by making a payment to receive the appropriate product. Usually, it is self-service and you only need to interact with buttons and an LCD for instructions and feedback. Another device that uses LCD and buttons to work properly and efficiently is the printer. You can set options by pressing the appropriate buttons with instructions displayed on the LCD.

This is Project 51 of the Arduino Intro app. This is an example of how to select modes or settings using a pushbutton and displaying the choice entered by the user on the LCD.

This project uses the I2C LCD. For more details on how to use this LCD, you may read this article: Displaying Characters Using the I2C Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)

This is Project 52 of the Arduino Intro app. It displays the status of the LED, whether it is turned on or off. A single pushbutton will turn on/off the LED.

Many projects that collect data of some kind can be made more user-friendly if a display is added directly to the device rather than using a serial or HDMI monitor. This can also act as an input device if a touchscreen is used. There are a variety of display options available on the market, and Arduino shields are available which provide an easy way to interface with a display for Arduino projects. Let’s take a look at what you can add to your next Arduino project.

These are the most common type of displays used in simpler projects. They are simple to operate, consume a small amount of power, and are very cheap. They usually include an array of characters, with some displays having a backlighting option for ease of reading in low light. It is possible to attach them directly to an Arduino, but they use many pins on the board. An I2C adapter can be used to control the display with only 4 pins.

These screens more desirable than a 7-segment display as they can display a large variety of characters. There is aLiquidCrystal librarythat you can use to control the LCD, although you will need a different adapter if you are using I2C.Hereis a video tutorial on how to set up and use this type of display.

These are simple displays with 8 LEDs (7 lines and 1 dot) that work pretty much like any LED, where a forward bias will light up the diode. Different numbers or characters can be formed by selectively lighting the segments. They are available in either common anode or common cathode configuration. A good tutorial for using these simpler displays can be foundhere, where you’ll learn how to interface this display with an Arduino board. These displays come in a variety of sizes ranging from single digits to an array of characters. If you just need to display numbers or a small number of letters (for example, with a door keypad or a timer), then you can give your project a cool retro feel with 7-segment displays.

These displays were used in old cell phones, where the background was grey and the font was simply a darker shade of grey. These are monochrome LCD displays with 84×48 pixel screen size. These cheaper modules can display text (even multiple lines, depending on the library being used) and images. Although the refresh rate is slow for animations, they work well for simple text display. This display usually comes with a backlight. It has a CMOS LCD controller and these displays only run at about 0.5 mA when on without backlighting. They also have a sleep mode, making them convenient for battery-operated devices.

If you are looking for something more than a 5110 LCD display, an OLED display can be a good option. At first glance, they look like the 5110 display, but they are significantly better. While the standard screen is 0.96” in monochrome with 128×64 pixels, they are available in a variety of sizes and colors, offering a versatile display for Arduino projects. Their refresh rate is also higher than many other displays. They can communicate with Arduino using I2C, so they do not use a lot of pins. These displays are usually thinner and lighter than an LCD, and they provide higher contrast than an LCD because no backlight is required. The price for these displays is slightly higher than a typical LCD.

Thin-film-transistor (TFT) LCDs are a step up in quality when your project requires a sophisticated display. They are available with or without touchscreen capabilities. They provide high resolution and can display thousands of unique colors. Often they have an SPI interface that integrates naturally into Arduino boards. They consume more power than other displays, but the display quality is better and they come in a similar price range. They usually come with a shield for easy integration. Touchscreens can be especially useful for cases where projects need user feedback and input.

The TFT LCD shown above connects to a standard header with pins, but more advanced TFTs canconnect to an Arduino or other boardwith a flex cable. These boards can’t connect directly to a standard Arduino, but they can connect to a standard or custom shield board. Make sure to check how your display connects to yourArduino projectas you may need to purchase or design a specific shield.

As the name suggests, an E-paper display (commonly found in E-readers) is intended to have the same look as natural paper. They differ from LCD and OLED displays in that they do not emit light, but rather reflect it, making the display very comfortable to read. Another great aspect of these displays is that they can store data for a long period of time without consuming power. This means they can display text or images after they are turned off, making them perfect for low power mobile Arduino projects.Here is a tutorialfor using them with Arduino.

Any of these displays can be a great addition to a new Arduino project. The choice of the best display depends mostly on the display quality you desire and your intended budget. They usually have a shield or can be interfaced directly to the Arduino header pins. Many projects may require multiple components, rather than just a display. It may be better to design a custom shield that can be used to interface with more than one component.

If you’re interested in designing a custom display shield for your Arduino board,Upverter® provides an easy, browser-based platform fordesigning new PCBs from start to finish. You can easily pick an existing template from a vast range ofopen-source hardware projects, or you canimport Arduino shield templates from Eagle libraries, available from Sparkfun or Adafruit. You can then proceed to lay out the design and make your own shield.

Before you learn how to connect your display to Arduino, it’s worth to think about what exact task it’s going to perform, to choose the right type and model of display. Commonly used with Arduino are 2×16 alphanumeric LCD displays (capable of displaying 2 lines of 16 characters each) with green or blue backlight.

In the offer of electronics shops you will often find e-paper displays as well – their main advantage over other screens is much lower energy consumption (due to the type of technology) and a unique image that looks literally as if the content was written on paper. The biggest disadvantage of this solution is of course the relatively high price per unit.

Shops often also offer larger versions of LCD displays, 8-segment displays, touch screens and many other solutions. The choice should be made based on the needs – for example, if the project is commercial and the device will be used in sunlight, and low price is not a priority – no backlighting will be an advantage and an e-paper display will work well for this. In a project where the device will only need to display a single number – an 8-segment display will work well. Nevertheless, the most popular choice remains the 2×16 LCD, which works well for most projects and is particularly popular with electronics beginners and students.

Due to its high popularity and usefulness, below we will describe how to connect a 2×16 LCD display. This type of equipment is usually sold as a display on a laminated PCB – some products have the I2C converter soldered in, but some models do not have it. In this case such a converter must also be prepared to realise the project. To complete the whole task it will be practical to use a contact board, thanks to which you will be able to reuse each of the used elements many times – also in other projects. Prepare also a set of connection wires (with male and female plugs on their ends) and

The first step is to solder a female goldpin to GPIO pins on Arduino board. Thanks to this, you will be able to connect any device in any configuration and use for example dedicated frontends (e.g. with male goldpins soldered on). If the I2C converter does not have male leads, a goldpin strip should be soldered there as well. Both components should be connected by correct positioning on the contact board. Converter should have 4 pins on output – it will be power supply (VCC), ground (GND) and SDA and SCL.

Before connecting the power supply make sure exactly what voltage your display requires – it will be 3.3 V or 5 V. Based on this information, connect the VCC pin from your converter to the corresponding voltage on your Arduino board. Of course, you can power the display with an external power supply, but this will only make sense if you connect more components to the board. The GND pin should be connected to the GND pin on the Arduino, and the SDA and SCL pins to the analog inputs on the board.

Oczywiście sposobów podłączania wyświetlacza jest bardzo wiele – te różnią się między sobą przede wszystkim w zależności od wyświetlaczy, ale także w zależności od przyzwyczajeń elektronika oraz od zadania jakie wyświetlacz ma spełniać. Nawet wśród najprostszych wyświetlaczy LCD 2×16 różnice między modelami mogą być stosunkowo duże, dlategoza każdym razem zapoznajmy się z dokumentacją techniczną, nawet jeszcze przed jego kupnem, aby uniknąć niemiłego zaskoczenia, kiedy staniemy przed problemem z podłączeniem lub przedwczesną diagnozą o uszkodzeniu sprzętu.