raspberry pi lcd display 16x2 in stock
The nice folks at Adafruit have put together a handy product tutorial page for assembly instructions before purchasing and some Python code to help you easily talk to the LCD and buttons You can also easily query the 5 keypad buttons to get input through the library, so you get extra buttons without using any more pins. The buttons are automatically de-bounced inside the library.
(At this time, the code and plate can control the RGB backlight of our character LCDs by turning each LED on or off. This means you can display the following colors: Red, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Violet, White and all off. There is no support for PWM control of the backlight at this time, so if you need to have more granular control of the RGB backlight to display a larger range of colors then this plate can"t do that because the I2C expander does not have PWM output.)
We really like the 16x2 Character LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another 1 to control the backlight for a total of 7 pins. That"s nearly all the GPIO available on a Pi!
With this in mind, Adafruit wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so they devised a Pi plate that lets you control a 16x2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the R-Pi! The best part is you don"t really lose those two pins either, since you can stick i2c-based sensors, RTCs, etc and have them share the I2C bus. This is a super slick way to add a display without all the wiring hassle.
This pi plate is perfect for when you want to build a stand-alone project with its own user interface. The 4 directional buttons plus select button allows basic control without having to attach a bulky computer.
The plate uses the I2C (SDA/SCL) pins. We have a special xtra-tall 26-pin header so the plate sits above the USB and Ethernet jacks. The resistors sit right above the USB ports. To keep them from shorting against the metal, a piece of electrical tape must be placed onto the USB ports.
This product comes as a kit! Included is a high quality PCB and all the components (buttons, header etc). A 16x2 Character blue&white monochrome LCD is included! Assembly is easy, even if you"ve never soldered before and the kit can be completed in 30 minutes. Check the product tutorial page for assembly instructions before purchasing You may get a 2-row or 1-row connector LCD, either will work fine.
Adafruit also have some handy Python code to help you easily talk to the LCD and buttons You can also easily query the 5 keypad buttons to get input through the library, so you get extra buttons without using any more pins. The buttons are automatically de-bounced inside the library.
This new Adafruit Pi Plate makes it easy to use a blue and white 16x2 Character LCD. We really like the 16x2 Character LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another 1 to control the backlight for a total of 7 pins. That"s nearly all the GPIO available on a Pi!
With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a Pi plate that lets you control a 16x2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the R-Pi! The best part is you don"t really lose those two pins either, since you can stick i2c-based sensors, RTCs, etc and have them share the I2C bus. This is a super slick way to add a display without all the wiring hassle.
This pi plate is perfect for when you want to build a stand-alone project with its own user interface. The 4 directional buttons plus select button allows basic control without having to attach a bulky computer.
The plate is designed for both Revision 1 and Revision 2 Raspberry Pi"s. It uses the I2C (SDA/SCL) pins. We have a special xtra-tall 26-pin header so the plate sits above the USB and Ethernet jacks. For Pi Model B+ and Pi 2, the resistors sit right above the new set of USB ports. To keep them from shorting against the metal, a piece of electrical tape must be placed onto the USB ports.
This product comes as a kit! Included is a high quality PCB and all the components (buttons, header etc). A 16x2 Character blue&white monochrome LCD is included! Assembly is easy, even if you"ve never soldered before and the kit can be completed in 30 minutes. Check the product tutorial page for assembly instructions before purchasing You may get a 2-row or 1-row connector LCD, either will work fine.
We also have some handy Python code to help you easily talk to the LCD and buttons You can also easily query the 5 keypad buttons to get input through the library, so you get extra buttons without using any more pins. The buttons are automatically de-bounced inside the library.
This is a 2*16 character RGB LCD+Keypad plate for Raspberry Pi. We made improvements in the wiring connection based on the previous LCD display as well as left out the contrast adjustment function, so the product can be pretty easy to use, and users can spend time focusing on the most important projects.
The RGB LCD1602 display is integrated on the shield. It leads out Raspberry Pi’s GPIO ports for connecting more device. Besides, the shield adopts I2C interface, so you can realize the 16 million color combination of the LCD, backlight brightness adjustment, display control etc. To convenient your use on Raspberry Pi, there are 5 push-buttons integrated on the board to help you to switch display and configure functions, then you can easily build up your data monitor and small operating platform.
**********Best Quality Guranteed.*****Components: Blue 16x2 1602 lcd display + I2C serial interface backpack; 1602 lcd screen can display 2-lines x 16-characters with built-in industry standard HD44780 equivalent LCD controller.*****Default Address: 0x27 for PCF8574T chip; 0x3F for PCF8574AT chip; please check which chip you have on i2c interface. (Before you upload the code to the control board, please download the LiquidCrystal_I2C library)*****Four Pins: VCC, GND,SDL and SCA used for connecting Dupont Line or IIC dedicated cable.*****Compatibility: used for connecting Arduino and Raspberry pi and it can be used to display real time clock, temperature, humidity etc. (A potentiometer is also necessary to adjust the contrast. Working Voltage: Only 5V )*****Wide Application: Commonly used in copiers, fax machines, laser printers, industrial test equipment and networking equipment such as routers and storage devices.
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Connecting an LCD display to your Raspberry Pi is sure to take any project up a notch. They’re great for displaying sensor readings, songs or internet radio stations, and stuff from the web like tweets and stock quotes. Whatever you choose to display, LCDs are a simple and inexpensive way to do it.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you two different ways to connect an LCD to the Raspberry Pi with the GPIO pins. The first way I’ll show you is in 8 bit mode, which uses 10 GPIO pins. Then I’ll show you how to connect it in 4 bit mode, and that uses only 6 pins. After we get the LCD hooked up I’ll show you how to program it with C, using Gordon Henderson’s WiringPi LCD library.
I’ll show you how to print text to the display, clear the screen, position the text, and control the cursor. You’ll also see how to scroll text, create custom characters, print data from a sensor, and print the date, time and IP address of your Pi.
There’s another way to connect your LCD that uses only two wires, called I2C. To see how to do that, check out our tutorial How to Set Up an I2C LCD on the Raspberry Pi.
Most people probably want to connect their LCD in 4 bit mode since it uses less wires. But in case you’re interested, I’ll show you how to connect it in 8 bit mode as well.
In 8 bit mode, each command or character is sent to the LCD as a single byte (8 bits) of data. The byte travels in parallel over 8 data wires, with each bit travelling through it’s own wire. 8 bit mode has twice the bandwidth as 4 bit mode, which in theory translates to higher data transfer speed. The main downside to 8 bit mode is that it uses up a lot of GPIO pins.
In 4 bit mode, each byte of data is sent to the LCD in two sets of 4 bits, one after the other, in what are known as the upper bits and lower bits. Although 8 bit mode transfers data about twice as fast as 4 bit mode, it takes a longer time for the LCD driver to process each byte than it takes to transmit the byte. So in reality, there isn’t really a noticeable difference in speed between 4 bit mode and 8 bit mode.
If you’ve never worked with C programs on the Raspberry Pi, you may want to read our article How to Write and Run a C Program on the Raspberry Pi first. It will explain how to write, compile, and run C programs.
WiringPi is a C module that makes it easy to program the LCD. If you already have WiringPi installed on your Pi, you can skip this section. If not, follow the steps below to install it:
WiringPi has it’s own pin numbering system that’s different from the Broadcom (BCM) and RPi physical (BOARD) pin numbering systems. All of the programs below use the WiringPi pin numbers.
To use different pins to connect the LCD, change the pin numbers defined in lines 5 to 14. You’ll need to convert the WiringPi pin numbers to the physical pin numbers of the Raspberry Pi. See here for a diagram you can use to convert between the different numbering systems.
To use the LCD in 4 bit mode, we need to set the bit mode number to 4 in the initialization function (line 20 below). The following code prints “Hello, world!” to the screen in 4 bit mode:
By default, text is printed to the screen at the top row, second column. To change the position, use lcdPosition(lcd, COLUMN, ROW). On a 16×2 LCD, the rows are numbered from 0 to 1, and the columns are numbered from 0 to 15.
The function lcdClear(lcd) clears the screen and sets the cursor position at the top row, first column. This program prints “This is how you” for two seconds, clears the screen, then prints “clear the screen” for another two seconds:
Each LCD character is a 5×8 array of pixels. You can create any pattern you want and display it on the LCD as a custom character. Up to 8 custom characters can be stored in the LCD memory at a time. This website has a nice visual way to generate the bit array used to define custom characters.
To print a single custom character, first define the character. For an example of this see lines 12 to 19 below. Then use the function lcdCharDef(lcd, 2, omega) to store the character in the LCD’s memory. The number 2 in this example is one of the 8 locations in the LCD’s character memory. The 8 locations are numbered 0-7. Then, print the character to the display with lcdPutchar(lcd, 2), where the number 2 is the character stored in memory location 2.
Here’s an example of using multiple custom characters that prints the Greek letters omega, pi, and mu, plus thermometer and water drop symbols for temperature and humidity:
As an example to show you how to display readings from a sensor, this program prints temperature and humidity readings to the LCD using a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. To see how to set up the DHT11 on the Raspberry Pi, see our article How to Set Up the DHT11 Humidity Sensor on the Raspberry Pi.
Hopefully this helped you get your LCD up and running on your Raspberry Pi. The programs above are just basic examples, so try combining them to create interesting effects and animations.
If you have any problems or questions about installing the LCD or programming it, just leave a comment below. And don’t forget to subscribe to get an email when we publish new articles. Talk to you next time!
Whenever you come across a LCD that looks like it has 16 connectors it is most likely using a HD44780 controller. These devices provide the same pinouts making them relatively easy to work with. The LCD uses a parallel interface meaning that we will need many pins from our raspberry pi4 to control it. In this tutorial we will use 4 data pins (4-bit mode) and two control pins.
The data pins are straightforward. They are sending data to the display (toggled high/low). We will only be using write mode and not reading any data.
The register select pin has two uses. When pulled low it can send commands to the LCD (like position to move to, or clear the screen). This is referred to as writing to the instruction or command register. When toggled the other way (1) the register select pin goes into a data mode and will be used to send data to the screen.
Clock (Enable). Falling edge triggered Bit 0 (Not used in 4-bit operation) Bit 1 (Not used in 4-bit operation) Bit 2 (Not used in 4-bit operation) Bit 3 (Not used in 4-bit operation) Bit 4 Bit 5 Bit 6 Bit 7 Backlight LED Anode (+) Backlight LED Cathode (-)Before wiring, check that your LCD has an LED backlight, not an EL backlight. LED backlights use 10-40mA of power, EL backlights use 200+ma! EL backlights are often cheap to get but are not usable, make sure you don"t use one or you will overload the Pi. Some cheap LCDs that have LED backlights do not include a resistor on the LCD module for the backlight, if you"re not sure, connect a 1Kohm resistor between pin 15 and 5V instead of connecting directly. All Adafruit LCDs have LED backlights with built in resistors so you do not need an extra resistor!Wiring Diagram How to connect 16x2 LCD with Raspberry pi4
First, connect the Cobbler power pins to the breadboard power rail. +5.0V from the cobbler goes to the red striped rail (red wire) and GND from the cobbler goes to the blue striped rail (black wire)
In order to send data to the LCD, we are going to wire it up as follows Pin #1 of the LCD goes to ground Pin #2 of the LCD goes to +5V Pin #3 (Vo) connects to the middle of the potentiometer Pin #4 (RS) connects to the Cobbler #21 Pin #5 (RW) goes to ground Pin #6 (EN) connects to Cobbler #20 Skip LCD Pins #7, #8, #9 and #10 Pin #11 (D4) connects to cobbler #16 Pin #12 (D5) connects to Cobbler #12 Pin #13 (D6) connects to Cobber #1 Pin #14 (D7) connects to Cobber #25 Pin #15 (LED +) goes to +5V (red wire) Pin #16 (LED -) goes to ground (black wire)
In this example, I am going to install and use the library from Adafruit. It’s designed for Adafruit LCD boards but will also work with other brands as well. If your display board uses an HD44780 controller, then it should work with no issues at all.
LCD screens are useful and found in many parts of our life. At the train station, parking meter, vending machines communicating brief messages on how we interact with the machine they are connected to. LCD screens are a fun way to communicate information in Raspberry Pi Pico projects and other Raspberry Pi Projects. They have a big bright screen which can display text, numbers and characters across a 16 x 2 screen. The 16 refers to 16 characters across the screen, and the 2 represents the number of rows we have. We can get LCD screens with 20x2, 20x4 and many other configurations, but 16x2 is the most common.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to connect an LCD screen, an HD44780, to a Raspberry Pi Pico via the I2C interface using the attached I2C backpack, then we will install a MicroPython library via the Thonny editor and learn how to use it to write text to the display, control the cursor and the backlight.
2. Import four librariesof pre-written code. The first two are from the Machine library and they enable us to use I2C and GPIO pins. Next we import the sleep function from Time enabling us to pause the code. Finally we import the I2C library to interact with the LCD screen.from machine import I2C, Pin
3. Create an objecti2c to communicate with the LCD screen over the I2C protocol. Here we are using I2C channel 0, which maps SDA to GP0 and SCL to GP1.i2c = I2C(0, sda=Pin(0), scl=Pin(1), freq=400000)
5. Create an objectlcdto set up the I2C connection for the library. It tells the library what I2C pins we are using, set via the i2c object, the address of our screen, set via I2C_ADDRand finally it sets that we have a screen with two rows and 16 columns.lcd = I2cLcd(i2c, I2C_ADDR, 2, 16)
6. Create a loopto continually run the code, the first line in the loop will print the I2C address of our display to Thonny’s Python Shell.while True:
8. Write two lines of textto the screen. The first will print “I2C Address:” followed by the address stored inside the I2C_ADDR object. Then insert a new line character “\n” and then write another line saying “Tom’s Hardware" (or whatever you want it to say). Pause for two seconds to allow time to read the text.lcd.putstr("I2C Address:"+str(I2C_ADDR)+"\n")
9. Clear the screenbefore repeating the previous section of code, but this time we display the I2C address of the LCD display using its hex value. The PCF8574T chip used in the I2C backpack has two address, 0x20 and 0x27 and it is useful to know which it is using, especially if we are using multiple I2C devices as they may cause a clash on the bus.lcd.clear()
12. Turn the backlight back onand then hide the cursor. Sometimes, a flashing cursor can detract from the information we are trying to communicate.lcd.backlight_on()
13. Create a for loopthat will print the number 0 to 19 on the LCD screen. Note that there is a 0.4 second delay before we delete the value and replace it with the next. We have to delete the text as overwriting the text will make it look garbled.for i in range(20):
Save and runyour code. As with any Python script in Thonny, Click on File >> Saveand save the file to your Raspberry Pi Pico. We recommend calling it i2c_lcd_test.py. When ready, click on the Green play buttonto start the code and watch as the test runs on the screen.