5110 lcd module free sample

This post aims to be a complete guide for Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino. I’ll explain what it does, show its specs and share an Arduino project example that you can take and apply to your own projects.

The Nokia 5110 LCD is very popular among the Arduino tinkerers. These modules are used on wide variety of applications that require some sort of interface or display data to the user.

The Nokia 5110 LCD operates at 3.3V. So you can’t connect the Arduino Uno digital pins directly. Read this blog post to learn how you can level shift the signals from 5V to 3.3V.

The name Nokia 5110 (3310) comes from Nokia 5110 (or Nokia 3310) mobile phone. The Nokia 5110 LCD has a controller named PCD8544. This LCD is similar to the Nokia 5110 mobile phone LCD, it uses SPI interface protocol with maximum clock frequency of 4MHz, it requires 5 control pins (at most), it’s low cost and easy to use.

The resolution of this LCD is 84 x 48 which means it has 4032 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (it’s not 5V tolerant), this means interfacing it with 5V microcontroller such as PIC18F46K22 MCU may require voltage level shifter.

This module has 8 pins (from left to right): RST (reset), CE (chip enable), DC (or D/C: data/command), Din (data in), Clk (clock), VCC (3.3V), BL (back light) and Gnd (ground).

The Nokia 5110 which is shown in the circuit diagram has 8 pins (from left to right): RST (reset), CE (chip enable), DC (or D/C: data/command), Din (data in), Clk (clock), VCC (3.3V), BL (back light) and Gnd (ground).

The Nokia 5110 LCD works with 3.3V only (power supply and control lines). The LCD module is supplied with 3.3V which comes from the AMS1117 3V3 voltage regulator, this regulator converts the 5V into 3.3V (supplies the LCD controller PCD8544 with regulated 3V3).

To connect the PIC18F46K22 to the LCD module, I used voltage divider for each line. That means there are 5 voltage dividers. Each voltage divider consists of 2.2k and 3.3k resistors, this drops the 5V into 3V which is sufficient.

The default connection setting of the Nokia 5110 LCD (PCD8544) library is hardware SPI1 module (SPI1_Init(); must be called before initiating the LCD). Instead of hardware SPI1 module, software SPI or hardware SPI2 module can be used.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In one of our previous tutorials we did an introduction on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD  with the Arduino, the tutorial covered displaying texts with different fonts etc. For this tutorial, we are taking things a little bit further and will be working through the display of customized graphics on the Nokia 5110 LCD display. This tutorial will particularly be useful for those who want to display their brand logo or any other kind of image on the LCD asides ordinary texts.

The Nokia 5110 display is basically a graphic LCD display useful for a lot of applications. It was intended originally to be used as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. This display uses a low powered CMOS LCD controller/driver PCD8544, which drives the graphic display of size 84×48. In a normal state, the display consumes about 6 to 7mA which makes it quite ideal for low power usage.

There are two main power sources needed. The first one is the operational power supply which according to the data sheet should be between the range of 2.7V to 3.3V.  The second power supply is required for the LCD back-light. The LCD circuit has no current limiting resistor inbuilt so its better to play safe and only power with 3.3V max.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using the paint.net tool to create the graphics. It is easy to use and can be downloaded from here. One thing that should be kept in mind while creating the graphics or logo is the canvass size. Since the LCD is 84×48, its important the canvass size is same as the screen, to ensure the designed graphics shows perfectly on the display.

In order to load our own graphics into the Arduino to be displayed by the Nokia 5110 display, we will need to use the LCD assistant software.  It is a free and easy to use software that converts bitmap images into a data array which can then be used in C programming language based firmware for any micro-controller. The software is available for download here.

With the LCD initialized, we then move to the loop proper. For each of the graphics to be displayed, we first clear the screen using lcd.clrscr() and then draw the graphics using lcd.drawbitmap() with the coordinates, name of the file, and the size as parameters. update the display with lcd.update() and set a delay to give the graphics enough time to display on the screen.

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.

(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.

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:

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.

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.

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;

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)

I almost have it working satisfactorily but I find that the bottom 1/5th of the screen does not function correctly. Sometimes it has some random blocks that are black, most of the time it is blank. I am not sure what would cause this. Is it safe to assume it is a defect on this module?

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/

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!

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 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

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

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?

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.

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 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 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.

If you are having problems with the black pixels in images/warping PCB, use original Nokia 5110, I happened to have one at home and it works as it should, no bad connections degrading image quality.

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.

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.

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"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Below is a snippet of the example LCD control code. This small novella of a sketch shows off an array of graphics driver functions, character drawing tools, and other useful functions to help you get started using the LCD. You will need to include the LCD_Functions.h header in the same directory as the sketch folder from the download. Otherwise, your code will not compile when uploading to Arduino.

Heads up! If the display is not showing pixels even with the correct logic levels and example code, it may just have slight variances in the way that they were manufactured. You can see the pixels faintly on the screen at an angle or pushing down on the LCD. You will need to try and set the contrast where it says setContrast(40) on line 87 to a value of 60. There is probably some variances in the LCD’s contrast which might explain why certain LCDs have issues displaying defined pixels on the screen.

Once uploaded to your Arduino, the sketch will begin by running the demo -- a set of basic animations and graphics functions. To begin, we"ll draw some random pixels on the screen ("It"s full of stars..."). Then we"ll move on to examples of drawing lines, rectangles, and circles. Throughout there are examples of drawing characters and strings. Finally the demo closes out with an homage to a monochrome comic which seems a perfect fit for this little monochrome LCD.

After the demo runs its course, the sketch will enter into a serial echo mode. Open the serial monitor (set the baud rate to 9600 bps), and type stuff over to the Arduino. It should start printing everything you send it onto the LCD.

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.

(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.

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:

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.

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.

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;

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)

I almost have it working satisfactorily but I find that the bottom 1/5th of the screen does not function correctly. Sometimes it has some random blocks that are black, most of the time it is blank. I am not sure what would cause this. Is it safe to assume it is a defect on this module?

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/

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!

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 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

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

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?

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.

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 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 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.

If you are having problems with the black pixels in images/warping PCB, use original Nokia 5110, I happened to have one at home and it works as it should, no bad connections degrading image quality.

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.

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.

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"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Remember the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had buttons and you only touched that tiny black and white screen if you needed to clean it? Nokia used these little LCDs in their 3310 and 5110 cell phones.

Thanks to the PCD8544 controller’s versatility, it includes on-chip generation of LCD supply and bias voltages which results in low power consumption making it suitable for power sensitive applications. In a normal state, the LCD consumes as low as 6 to 7mA only.

If you want to change the backlight of the LCD, just remove the LCD off the board by pushing the metal clips at the back side. When the screen comes off, you will notice the four LEDs soldered around the edges of the display. Just replace the LEDs with desired color LEDs.

There are many versions of these LCD displays that don’t come with any current limiting resistor. This means you have to be careful while connecting power supply to it. As a precautionary measure, you can place a 330Ω current limiting resistor in series with the ‘Backlight’ pin.

The PCD8544 LCD driver has a built-in 504 bytes Graphic Display Data RAM (GDDRAM) for the screen which holds the bit pattern to be displayed. This memory area is organized in 6 banks (from 0 to 5). Each bank contains 84 columns/segments (from 0 to 83). And each column can store 8 bits of data (from 0 to 7). That surely tells us we have

But unfortunately, the LCD has 3v communication levels, so we cannot directly connect these pins to the Arduino. We need some protection. This can be done by shifting levels.

The PCD8544 LCD controller has flexible yet complex drivers. Vast knowledge on memory addressing is required in order to use the PCD8544 controller. Fortunately, Adafruit’s PCD8544 Nokia 5110 LCD library was written to hide away all the complexities so that we can issue simple commands to control the display.

Filter your search by typing ‘nokia’. There should be a couple entries. Look for Adafruit PCD8544 Nokia 5110 LCD library. Click on that entry, and then select Install.

This will give you complete understanding about how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display and can serve as the basis for more practical experiments and projects. Try the sketch out and then we will dissect it in some detail.

The sketch starts by including three libraries viz. SPI.h, Adafruit_GFX.h and Adafruit_PCD8544.h. Next, we need to create an LCD object. This object takes 5 parameters and specifies which Arduino pins are connected to the LCD’s CLK, Din, D/C, CE and RST pin. We also defined rotatetext variable which will make sense a little later.

In setup function: we need to initialize the LCD object using begin() function. We also need to set the contrast of the display using setContrast(value) function with value can be anywhere between 0-100. However, value between 50-60 gives great results.

In order for the library to perform extremely fast mathematical operations on the screen buffer (more than 100 frames per second), calls to the print functions do not immediately transfer the contents of screen buffer to the PCD8544 controller. A display() command is required to instruct the library to perform the bulk transfer from the screen buffer in the ATmega328P to the internal memory of the PCD8544 controller. As soon as the memory is being transferred, the pixels corresponding to the screen buffer will show up on the LCD display.

Numbers can be displayed on the LCD display by just calling print() or println() function. An overloaded implementation of these functions accepts 32-bit unsigned int, so you can only display numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295.

This last example shows how to draw bitmap images to the Nokia 5110 LCD Display. This is useful for creating splash screens of company logos, making sprites or just creating fun graphics for displaying information. Copy the following code, paste it into the Arduino IDE and click upload.

To show bitmap image on the Nokia 5110 LCD display we need to call drawBitmap() function. It takes six parameters viz. Top left corner X coordinate, top left corner Y coordinate, byte array of monochrome bitmap, width of bitmap in pixels, height of bitmap in pixels and Color.

But, before we can call the drawBitmap() function, we first need an image to draw. Remember, the screen resolution of Nokia 5110 LCD display is 84×48 pixels, so images larger than that will not display correctly. To get a correctly sized image, you can use your favorite drawing programs like Inkscape, Photoshop, Paint, etc., setting the canvas size to 84×48 pixels.

Once you have a bitmap, it’s time to convert it into an array that the PCD8544 controller can understand. This can be done using two ways: Online method using image2cpp and Offline method using LCD Assistant.

There’s an online application called image2cpp – http://javl.github.io/image2cpp/ which can convert your image into an array. Image2cpp is newer and much more powerful than LCD Assistant (later solution). It will allow you to:

There’s another application called LCD assistant – http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/which can convert your bitmap image into data array. It’s not as powerful as image2cpp but still popular among hobbyists.

The Philips PCD8544 driver chip is connected to a recycled screen from the very popular Nokia 5110 phone. Because the screens are second hand there are often small scratches/blemishes on the glass cover. They are rehoused in a metal box on a PCB with 8 connections. You need to solder on the supplied pins. The screen is a Liquid Crystal Display, LCD.

The method works but we need to find an easier method of obtaining the bytes for a screen image. I decided to use Paint.net, to create the image, and LCDAssistant to convert a bitmap file to a list of bytes.

Now that the contrast has been fixed, we can see that the display has a slight aspect ratio ‘feature’ and circles appear as ellipses. The lower pixel count means that there is less space to write and draw when compared to other LCD displays – especially when compared with the SSD1306 128×64 display. However, the screen size and pixels are larger aiding visibility from a greater distance.

In this article, we are publishing a project tutorial which explains different aspects of interfacing a Graphical LCD (GLCD ) Nokia 5110 with Arduino. Nokia 5110 is a  48 x 84 graphic LCD that has an internal controllerPCD8544 to control all displays and operations. The Nokia 5110 is interfaced to the microcontroller through a serial bus interface. After going through the project you can display the graphics ortext you wish to be displayed. So let’s begin our tutorial and learn how to interface a graphical LCD like Nokia 5110 to Arduino.

As mentioned earlier the signal connection for controlling operation of LCD is the Serial format. Command mode and Data mode are the two modes that are used for communicating with LCD.

The DC pin of the LCD is used for selecting the mode. if DC = 0, the data that is sent to the LCD is Command and if DC = 1, the data that is sent to LCD will be Data and it will be placed in DDRAM Memory (Display Data RAM) to be displayed on LCD Display. The value of DDRAM will be incremented automatically after writing 1 byte into it. While sending each byte, the MSB will be sent first.

“Data()” and “Cmd()” are the subroutines used for selecting the mode of sending data (Data mode and Command mode). The arrangement of memory in LCD 5110 is in matrix form consist of 6 rows (Y Address) and 84 columns (X Address). Data will be sent as bytes and it will be arranged as a vertical line. If we want to access to the position of displaying the result on LCD Display, we must refer to the relationship between X-Address and Y-Address. Subroutines used for this are “setPixel()” and “setCursor()”. “allClear()” is the subroutine used for clearing the entire DDRAM.

As the name says “Initialize_LCD()” is the function used for sending commands to the LCD for its initialization. “charDisp()” and “stringDisp()” are for displaying characters and strings respectively.

A simple library for Nokia5110 module is also attached with this article. Using library will make your program appear more simple. Few examples are also included in it, which will show how to use it properly.

We have received a number of requests for examples on how to use our Nokia 5110 with Arduino - so here it goes. For this tip we used a Arduino Nano, but any Arduino can be used.

Use our Nokia 5110 displays - which feature a PCD8544 CMOS LCD controller/driver - with an Arduino (compatible) development board and the Arduino IDE.

The pin connections are guaranteed to work with our Nokia 5110 displays. Other similar displays might have a different pin layout and you will need to adapt to your specific module.

We will be using Gavin Lyons" "Nokia 5110 Text" Library which is available through the Arduino IDE Library Manager. There are other options, this one is the easiest (we found).

For 5110 LCD and TFT LCD series products, customers have unclear idea about their advantages and disadvantages, confused about how to choose them according to different situations, therefore, currently we make this video tutorial about 5110 LCD, 1.8"" TFT LCD,2.2"" TFT LCD. We really hope this LCD User Guide can reduce your difficulty in using them, as we continually receive email requesting for TFT LCD technical support. Anyway, have a look, if you still have problem, welcome to contact us.

The mobile phone screen which could be reused will be increasingly reduced, so the 5110 stock is unstable, and the quality of reused screen can also not be ensured, what"s more worse, the 5110 LCD can only display white and black picture, therefore, the TFT LCD with sufficient stock, good quality, supporting colorful display will definitely replace the 5110 and become the LCD trend.

As the TFT LCD is compatible with 5110 LCD interface, you do not need to change the jumper wire position between UNO and breadboard, and you just need to replace the 5110 LCD into 1.8" TFT LCD.