20x4 i2c character lcd display brands

The LCD03 is a 20 x 4 character display that is easy to hook up to any microcontroller thanks to its support for both serial and I2C interfaces requiring only 2 data pins on the controller, plus power & ground.

Control of the backlight can be done through software via the I2C or serial interface. A 100 byte FIFO buffer is included to speed up writing to the display to avoid blocking the controller and there is support for formatting custom characters that can be stored in memory and written to screen.

A 3x4 keypad can also be connected directly to the LCD display which will scan the keypad and provide data for reading via the I2C or serial interface.

A wide variety of 20x4 lcd display options are available to you, You can also choose from original manufacturer, odm 20x4 lcd display,As well as from tft, ips, and standard.

If you’ve ever tried to connect an LCD display to an Arduino, you might have noticed that it consumes a lot of pins on the Arduino. Even in 4-bit mode, the Arduino still requires a total of seven connections – which is half of the Arduino’s available digital I/O pins.

The solution is to use an I2C LCD display. It consumes only two I/O pins that are not even part of the set of digital I/O pins and can be shared with other I2C devices as well.

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.

If you look closely you can see tiny rectangles for each character on the display and the pixels that make up a character. Each of these rectangles is a grid of 5×8 pixels.

At the heart of the adapter is an 8-bit I/O expander chip – PCF8574. This chip converts the I2C data from an Arduino into the parallel data required for an LCD display.

If you are using multiple devices on the same I2C bus, you may need to set a different I2C address for the LCD adapter so that it does not conflict with another I2C device.

An important point here is that several companies manufacture the same PCF8574 chip, Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors, to name a few. And the I2C address of your LCD depends on the chip manufacturer.

According to the Texas Instruments’ datasheet, the three address selection bits (A0, A1 and A2) are placed at the end of the 7-bit I2C address register.

According to the NXP Semiconductors’ datasheet, the three address selection bits (A0, A1 and A2) are also placed at the end of the 7-bit I2C address register. But the other bits in the address register are different.

So your LCD probably has a default I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it.

Connecting an I2C LCD is much easier than connecting a standard LCD. You only need to connect 4 pins instead of 12. Start by connecting the VCC pin to the 5V output on the Arduino and GND to ground.

Now we are left with the pins which are used for I2C communication. Note that each Arduino board has different I2C pins that must be connected accordingly. On Arduino boards with the R3 layout, the SDA (data line) and SCL (clock line) are on the pin headers close to the AREF pin. They are also known as A5 (SCL) and A4 (SDA).

After wiring up the LCD you’ll need to adjust the contrast of the display. On the I2C module you will find a potentiometer that you can rotate with a small screwdriver.

Plug in the Arduino’s USB connector to power the LCD. 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.

To drive an I2C LCD you must first install a library called LiquidCrystal_I2C. This library is an enhanced version of the LiquidCrystal library that comes with your Arduino IDE.

Filter your search by typing ‘liquidcrystal‘. There should be some entries. Look for the LiquidCrystal I2C library by Frank de Brabander. Click on that entry, and then select Install.

The I2C address of your LCD depends on the manufacturer, as mentioned earlier. If your LCD has a Texas Instruments’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x27Hex. If your LCD has NXP Semiconductors’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x3FHex.

So your LCD probably has I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it. Luckily there’s an easy way to do this, thanks to the Nick Gammon.

But, before you proceed to upload the sketch, you need to make a small change to make it work for you. You must pass the I2C address of your LCD and the dimensions of the display to the constructor of the LiquidCrystal_I2C class. 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!

First of all an object of LiquidCrystal_I2C class is created. This object takes three parameters LiquidCrystal_I2C(address, columns, rows). This is where you need to enter the address you found earlier, and the dimensions of the display.

In ‘setup’ we call three functions. The first function is init(). It initializes the LCD object. The second function is clear(). This clears the LCD screen and moves the cursor to the top left corner. And third, the backlight() function turns on the LCD backlight.

After that we set the cursor position to the third column of the first row by calling the function lcd.setCursor(2, 0). 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_I2C 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.

To use createChar() you first set up an array of 8 bytes. Each byte in the array represents a row of characters in a 5×8 matrix. Whereas, 0 and 1 in a byte indicate which pixel in the row should be ON and which should be OFF.

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.

Your imagination is limitless. The only limitation is that the LiquidCrystal library only supports eight custom characters. But don’t be discouraged, look at the bright side, at least we have eight characters.

After the library is included and the LCD object is created, custom character arrays are defined. The array consists of 8 bytes, each byte representing a row of a 5×8 LED matrix. In this sketch, eight custom characters have been created.

In setup, a custom character is created using the createChar() function. This function takes two parameters. The first parameter is a number between 0 and 7 to reserve one of the 8 supported custom characters. The second is the name of the array.

As we all know, though LCD and some other displays greatly enrich the man-machine interaction, they share a common weakness. When they are connected to a controller, multiple IOs will be occupied of the controller which has no so many outer ports. Also it restricts other functions of the controller. Therefore, LCD2004 with an I2C bus is developed to solve the problem.

I2C bus is a type of serial bus invented by PHLIPS. It is a high performance serial bus which has bus ruling and high or low speed device synchronization function required by multiple host system. I2C bus has only two bidirectional signal lines, Serial Data Line (SDA) and Serial Clock Line (SCL). The blue potentiometer on the I2C LCD2004 is used to adjust backlight to make it easier to display on the I2C LCD2004.

I²C (Inter-Integrated Circuit), pronounced I-squared-C, is a multi-master, multi-slave, single-ended, serial computer bus invented by Philips Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductors). It is typically used for attaching lower-speed peripheral ICs to processors and microcontrollers. Alternatively I²C is spelled I2C (pronounced I-two-C) or IIC (pronounced I-I-C).

I²C uses only two bidirectional open-drain lines, Serial Data Line (SDA) and Serial Clock Line (SCL), pulled up with resistors. Typical voltages used are +5 V or +3.3 V although systems I²C (Inter-Integrated Circuit), pronounced I-squared-C, is a multi-master, multi-slave, single-ended, serial computer bus invented by Philips Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductors). It is typically used for attaching lower-speed peripheral ICs to processors and microcontrollers. Alternatively I²C is spelled I2C (pronounced I-two-C) or IIC (pronounced I-I-C).

3) Find the file LiquidCrystal_I2C which you just download. Click it open and then you"ll be prompted by "Library added to your libraries. Check "Import libraries"”. You also can see the libraries just imported have appeared on the list by Sketch->Include Library->LiquidCrystal_I2C.

If everything is correct,But the display just shows 16 black rectangles on Line 1.it may be the address of i2c is not 0x27,therfore you need to run the following code to read the address,then modify the 0x27 to which you read.

If your current LCD is frustrating you because it occupies all your GPIO pins and lacks characters" space, it is time to replace it with this one. This LCD Display Module uses an I2C communication interface, which only needs 2 wires to display information on any microcontroller-based project, including the Arduino. It is capable of displaying 4 lines of 20 white characters on a blue background. Moreover, it is compatible with either 3.3V or 5V logic systems, which is basically everything in programmable electronics.

ERM2004SBS-3 is small size 20 characters wide,4 rows character lcd module,SPLC780C controller (Industry-standard HD44780 compatible controller),6800 4/8-bit parallel interface,single led backlight with white color included can be dimmed easily with a resistor or PWM,stn- blue lcd negative,white text on the blue color,wide operating temperature range,rohs compliant,built in character set supports English/Japanese text, see the SPLC780C datasheet for the full character set, It’s optional for pin header connection,5V or 3.3V power supply and I2C adapter board for arduino.

Double click on the "LiquidCrystalDisplay1" and in the Elements window drag "Text Field" to the left side, then in the properties window set text to "HELLO WORLD" and width to 20

If you power the Arduino UNO module, the LCD Display will start to show the "Hello World" text. In case you dont see any text make sure you adjust the brightness using a potentiometer.

Everyone loves character LCD, is cheap and works out of box! This is 20x4 character LCD module. But the need for 6 to 10 GPIOs is the pain :) It takes most of GPIO of Arduino and other microcontroller. Now with this I2C or Two wires interface LCD, you will save a lot of GPIO for your sensor and motor control.

LCD shield after connected with a certain sensors or SD card. However, with this I2C interface LCD module, you will be able to realize data display via only 2 wires. If you already has I2C devices in your project, you can still program this LCD with the correct I2C address. It is fantastic for Arduino based project.