low power lcd display arduino made in china

The ST7290 allows you to define up to four 16x16 bitmaps. These bitmaps can be shown in any 16-bit location in the DDRAM, occupying the place of two individual characters.

The datasheet says that it"s extremely low power. I hooked it up and was measuring a current of 2.0 to 2.25mA depending on whether it was active or sleeping. This didn"t make sense since it was advertised as being super low power. I realized that I had been given the 5V version which includes a 3.3v linear regulator (large 3-pin chip on left side of image). I removed the regulator since I"m running it at 3.3V, but that only reduced the current consumption by a small amount. The PCB I received has a Chinese font serial EPROM in the upper left corner (U1 - missing in the photo). Since I don"t intend to use it, I removed it and now the current measures from 0 (sleeping) to 276uA (active). This is nearly half the active current (400uA) of the Nokia 5110 and at a higher resolution. The backlighting is bright and evenly distributed and only draws an additional 4.8mA. If any of you have the same PCB that I bought and were wondering why it was drawing so much current, hopefully this info has helped you.

I don"t know where the term "PLJ-6LED 2004A" came from since the first half (PLJ-6LED) seems to refer to a 6-digit, 7-segment display that does not show up on the Sainsmart website. The second half (2004A) comes up often since it refers to the 20x4 display size. It doesn"t much matter which one you are using since they are all more or less the same as long as the row of pins is at the upper left (and not the lower left) corner of the pc board.

I assume you mean the "New Liquidcrystal library" which is a replacement for, not an accessory to, the library that comes with the Arduino IDE. You must follow the installation instructions for this library which you can get here. I believe they also come packaged with the library. Basically you have to remove all traces of any other LiquidCrystal libraries for this one to compile.

I assume that you are referring to this ArduinoInfo page, and to the device he calls "I2C LCD DISPLAY VERSION 1:" That tutorial is actually the one I used when I was tinkering with my adapter which looks like that one and also came on a slow boat from the far east, Banggood in my case.

There are also eight different combinations of jumper possibilities for A0, A1 and A2 although they are almost always all pulled high or all pulled low. This leaves four possible addresses of which he mentions only the two that result with the jumpers setting the address pins high (0x27 and 0x3F). If the jumpers set the address pins low you get the base addresses mentioned above.

You also have to deal with the connections between the chip on the IC and the pins that go to the LCD module. These are specific to each pc board and the tutorial gives you the constructor that goes with each of the boards pictured. There is a "guesser" sketch available here if you want to go that route.

Cheap LCD Modules, Buy Quality Electronic Components & Supplies Directly from China Suppliers:3.5 inch TFT Touch Screen LCD Module Display 320*480 intelligent LCD Adapter for ar…

The Nokia 5110 is a low-resolution monochrome LCD that’s cheap and extremely low-power. A family of small monochrome OLEDs provide crisp, bright displays with a bit more resolution, in a teeny-tiny package. A 1.8 inch color TFT provides even greater resolution and 18-bit color, while still limiting power to about 90 milliwatts.

This is the display I’m currently using for my Backcountry Logger project. It’s cheap, easy to use, and consumes very little power. You don’t really need the backlight for daytime visibility, and with backlight off, it consumes just 400 uA! Awesome for battery-powered projects. Just 1-2 mA worth of backlight current is plenty for night-time visibility too, although more would be nicer. This puts the display well within the capabilities of a single CR2032 coin cell.

Working with the display is simple, as long as you remeber it’s a 3.3v device and not 5v tolerant. There are lots of great tutorials and examples available for this display, including this nice one from Adafruit. Communication with the display controller uses SPI. Writing a single byte sets 8 pixels at a time, so pixels are not individually addressable. If you’re mostly displaying text or bitmaps this isn’t a problem, but if you need a more complex image consisting of many overlapping elements, you’ll need to composite them in software before sending the result to the display.

The weak points of the Nokia 5110 display are resolution and looks. The contrast and sharpness are pretty good for a display of this type, but there’s still no getting around the fact that this is a low-res, dark-gray on light-gray display. The 84 x 48 resolution allows for just 14 x 6 characters using a typical 5 x 7 font (allowing for space between letters). If you seek utility, low cost, and low power, it’s a great solution. If you want something with a bit more bling, look elsewhere.

This little OLED display comes in a few slightly different flavors, but all of them are tiny. It’s one thing to read the dimensions (0.96 inches horizontally), but another to see it in person. All three of the displays discussed here are small, but this particular OLED is smaller than a postage stamp. It’s about the size of the last joint on my thumb.

Despite its small size, the OLED display is very readable. It’s sharp and bright, and a pleasure to look at. Since it’s an OLED, there’s no backlight, and current draw varies between about 5 to 13 mA in my testing, depending on how many pixels are illuminated. The 128 x 64 resolution is a nice bump from the Nokia 5110 display, allowing for 21 x 8 characters. Communication choices are SPI, I2C, or parallel, selectable via configuration pins. Like the Nokia, each byte sets 8 pixels at a time. Adafruit has a tutorial and library.

The display controller chip runs at 3.3v, and the display itself needs 7-12v, although you might be able to get away with a single supply depending on which display variant you have.

Adafruit sells this display on a break-out board, with white pixels, with a SSD1306 controller. The SSD1306 has a built-in charge pump, and can optionally generate 7.5v for the display from a 3.3v supply, which is a very convenient option. Sparkfun sells the naked LCD, with white or blue pixels, and a SSD1308 controller that lacks the charge pump. You’ll need to mount the 0.5 mm pitch connector somehow, and provide a separate power supply for the logic and display. The most common eBay variant comes on a break-out board, with the SSD1306 controller, and yellow pixels in the top quarter and blue pixels in the bottom three quarters. Mine also came hard-wired to use the parallel interface, and switching to SPI required wicking away some solder jumpers and adding new ones.

This display meets a narrower range of needs, but is awesome for its target niche. I’m strongly considering doing a version 2.0 of the Backcountry Logger using this display, to gain the benefit of smaller size, higher resolution, and better looks. Unfortunately with the amount of current it needs, it’s probably outside of what a CR2032 can provide, and will require 2 x AAA or 1 x AAA with a DC boost converter.

This is the display I plan to use for Tiny CPU. Unlike the others, it’s a full color display with individually addressable pixels. It supports 18-bit color, but can also be configured for 16-bit color or monochrome (I think? Haven’t tried that yet). It’s a bit larger than the other two, but still quite small compared to most displays. It is natively a 3.3v device, but the Adafruit breakout board includes an LDO regulator and level-shifter chip, so it can be used with 5v microcontrollers as well. Current demands are the highest of the three displays, but not excessive at about 1 mA for logic and 26 mA for the backlight. The backlight can be dimmed using PWM to further reduce the current. This is still well within the capabilities of an AAA-based battery-powered project.

The TFT is very attractive, not quite on par with the OLED, but certainly nicer than the CSTN used in some other cheap color LCDs. The 160 x 120 resolution feels giant in comparison with the previous displays, allowing for 26 x 15 characters. The display controller allows for a few different protocols, but the break-out board hard-wires it for SPI.

With the larger resolution and greater bit depth, a screen’s worth of data requires many more bytes than the previous two displays. Depending on the speed of your microcontroller and SPI interface, this may result in noticeably slower refresh times. I tested it using hardware SPI on a 16 MHz Arduino, and found the refresh time to be acceptable.

Adafruit has a nice tutorial and library for working with this display (I’m sensing a theme here). Unexpectedly, the breakout board also has a micro-SD card reader on it. Ignore it, or use it as a bonus peripheral in your next project.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this article about using a text variable as an array, either an array of strings or an array of numbers, using the covx conversion function in addition for the latter, to extract single elements with the help of the spstr function. It"s a convenient and almost a "one fits all" solution for most use cases and many of the demo projects or the sample code attached to the Nextion Sunday Blog articles made use of it, sometimes even without mentioning it explicitly since it"s almost self-explaining. Then, I got a message from a reader, writing: "... Why then didn"t you use it for the combined sine / cosine lookup table in the flicker free turbo gauge project?"105 editions of the Nextion Sunday blog in a little over two years - time to look back and forth at the same time. Was all the stuff I wrote about interesting for my readers? Is it possible at all to satisfy everybody - hobbyists, makers, and professionals - at the same time? Are people (re-)using the many many HMI demo projects and code snippets? Is anybody interested in the explanation of all the underlying basics like the algorithms for calculating square roots and trigonometric functions with Nextion"s purely integer based language? Are optimized code snippets which allow to save a few milliseconds here and there helpful to other developers?Looking through the different Nextion user groups on social networks, the Nextion user forum and a few not so official but Nextion related forums can be surprising. Sometimes, Nextion newbies ask questions or have issues although the required function is well (in a condensed manner for the experienced developer, I admit) documented on the Nextion Instruction Set page, accessible through the menu of this website. On top of that, there is for sure one of my more than 100 Sunday blog articles which deals not only with that function, but goes often even beyond the usual usage of it. Apparently, I should sometimes move away from always trying to push the limits and listen to the "back to the roots!" calls by my potential readers...Do you remember the (almost) full screen sized flicker free and ultra rapid gauge we designed in June? And this without using the built-in Gauge component? If not, it"s time to read this article first, to understand today"s improvements. The June 2022 version does its job perfectly, the needle movement is quick and smooth, and other components can be added close to the outer circle without flickering since there is no background which needs constantly to be redrawn. But there was a minor and only esthetic weak point: The needle was a 1px thin line, sometimes difficult to see. Thus, already a short time after publishing, some readers contacted me and asked if there were a way to make the needle thicker, at least 2 pixels.Recently, when playing with a ESP32 based NodeMCU 32S and especially with its WiFi configuration, I did as (I guess) everybody does: I loaded an example sketch to learn more about the Wifi library. When you set up the ESP32 as an access point, creating its own wireless network, everything is pretty straightforward. You can easily hard code the Wifi name (SSID) and the password. But what about the client mode ? Perhaps one needs to use it in different environments. And then, a hard coded network name and password are definitively not the best solution. Thus, I thought, why not use a Nextion HMI for a dynamic WiFi setup functionality?Although the Nextion MIDI I/O interface  has been primarily designed as an add-on for Nextion HMI screens to transform these in fully autonomous MIDI devices as shown in previous blog posts here, it is also of great use for any Arduino based electronic music project! Many MIDI projects for Arduino suffer from a lack good hardware support. There are sophisticated code, excellent libraries and an infinity of use cases, but afterwards, things tend not to work in a rather rough environment in the studio or on stage. That"s because two resistors and a few Dupont wires on a breadboard besides the Arduino are not really an interface which could drive your Synth, Sequencer, or Drum machine over a 5m long MIDI cable.

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!

Next on our list is the 5110 display, also affectionately known as the Nokia display due to its wide use in the beloved and nigh indestructible Nokia 3310.

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 is what gives e-paper such a natural feel. As a bonus, once the ink is moved to its location, it uses no power to keep it there. This makes these displays naturally low-power to operate.

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?

It also has It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button.

Development board is a printed circuit board with circuitry and hardware on-board to facilitate experimentation with certain microcontrollers. These boards can save you from a lot of repetitive tasks. Arduino is a Development Board.

Crystal Oscillator : The crystal oscillator helps Arduino in dealing with time issues. Arduino calculates time by using the crystal oscillator. The number printed on top of the Arduino crystal is 16.000H9H. It tells us that the frequency is 16,000,000 Hertz or 16 MHz.

The Arduino UNO board has6 analog input pins A0 through A5. These pins can read the signal from an analog sensor like the humidity sensor or temperature sensor and convert it into a digital value that can be read by the microprocessor.

Each Arduino board has its own microcontroller (11). You can assume it as the brain of your board. The main IC (integrated circuit) on the Arduino is slightly different from board to board. Arduino consists of ATMega328P.

9. TX and RX Pins: On the board, there are find two labels: TX (transmit) and RX (receive).They appear in two places on the Arduino UNO board.First, at the digital pins 0 and 1, to indicate the pins responsible for serial communication.

10. Digital I/O Pins:The Arduino UNO board has 14 digital I/O pins(of which 6 provide PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) output. These pins can be configured to work as input digital pins to read logic values (0 or 1) or as digital output pins to drive different modules like LEDs, relays, etc. The pins labeled “~” can be used to generate PWM.

lcd.begin(rows,cols): Initializes the interface to the LCD screen, and specifies the dimensions (width and height) of the display. It needs to be called before any other LCD library commands. We have 16 rows and 2 columns.

This post is an introduction to the Nextion display with the Arduino. We’re going to show you how to configure the display for the first time, download the needed resources, and how to integrate it with the Arduino UNO board. We’ll also make a simple graphical user interface to control the Arduino pins.

Nextion is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) solution. Nextion displays are resistive touchscreens that makes it easy to build a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a great solution to monitor and control processes, being mainly applied to IoT applications.

The Nextion has a built-in ARM microcontroller that controls the display, for example it takes care of generating the buttons, creating text, store images or change the background. The Nextion communicates with any microcontroller using serial communication at a 9600 baud rate.

To design the GUI, you use the Nextion Editor, in which you can add buttons, gauges, progress bars, text labels, and more to the user interface in an easy way. We have the 2.8” Nextion display basic model, that is shown in the following figure.

Connecting the Nextion display to the Arduino is very straightforward. You just need to make four connections: GND, RX, TX, and +5V. These pins are labeled at the back of your display, as shown in the figure below.

You can power up the Nextion display directly from the Arduino 5V pin, but it is not recommended. Working with insufficient power supply may damage the display. So, you should use an external power source. You should use a 5V/1A power adaptor with a micro USB cable. Along with your Nextion display, you’ll also receive a USB to 2 pin connector, useful to connect the power adaptor to the display.

The best way to get familiar with a new software and a new device is to make a project example. Here we’re going to create a user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins, and display data.

The user interface has two pages: one controls two LEDs connected to the Arduino pins, and the other shows data gathered from the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor;

We won’t cover step-by-step how to build the GUI in the Nextion display. But we’ll show you how to build the most important parts, so that you can learn how to actually build the user interface. After following the instructions, you should be able to complete the user interface yourself.

Additionally, we provide all the resources you need to complete this project. Here’s all the resources you need (be aware that you may need to change some settings on the user interface to match your display size):

Open Nextion Editor and go to File > New to create a new file. Give it a name and save it. Then, a window pops up to chose your Nextion model, as show in the figure below.

We’ll start by adding a background image. To use an image as a background, it should have the exact same dimensions as your Nextion display. We’re using the 2.8” display, so the background image needs to be 240×320 pixels. Check your display dimensions and edit your background image accordingly. As an example, we’re using the following image:

At this moment, you can start adding components to the display area. For our project, drag three buttons, two labels and one slider, as shown in the figure below. Edit their looks as you like.

All components have an attribute called objname. This is the name of the component. Give good names to your components because you’ll need them later for the Arduino code. Also note that each component has one id number that is unique to that component in that page. The figure below shows the objname and id for the slider.

You should trigger an event for the touchable components (the buttons and the slider) so that the Arduino knows that a component was touched. You can trigger events when you press or when you release a component.

Our second page will display data from the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. We have several labels to hold the temperature in Celsius, the temperature in Fahrenheit, and the humidity. We also added a progress bar to display the humidity and an UPDATE button to refresh the readings. The bBack button redirects to page0.

Notice that we have labels to hold the units like “ºC”, “ºF” and “%”, and empty labels that will be filled with the readings when we have our Arduino code running.

Once the GUI is ready, you need to write the Arduino code so that the Nextion can interact with the Arduino and vice-versa. Writing code to interact with the Nextion display is not straightforward for beginners, but it also isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

A good way to learn how to write code for the Arduino to interact with the Nextion display is to go to the examples folder in the Nextion library folder and explore. You should be able to copy and paste code to make the Arduino do what you want.

The first thing you should do is to take note of your components in the GUI that will interact with the Arduino and take note of their ID, names and page. Here’s a table of all the components the code will interact to (your components may have a different ID depending on the order you’ve added them to the GUI).

For the slider (h0), you have the following function that writes the current slider position on the tSlider label and sets led2 brightness accordingly:

Finally, you need a function for the bUpdate (the update button). When you click this button the DHT temperature and humidity sensor reads temperature and humidity and displays them on the corresponding labels, as well as the humidity on the progress bar. That is the bUpdatePopCallback() function.

In this post we’ve introduced you to the Nextion display. We’ve also created a simple application user interface in the Nextion display to control the Arduino pins. The application built is just an example for you to understand how to interface different components with the Arduino – we hope you’ve found the instructions as well as the example provided useful.

In our opinion, Nextion is a great display that makes the process of creating user interfaces simple and easy. Although the Nextion Editor has some issues and limitations it is a great choice for building interfaces for your electronics projects. We have a project on how to create a Node-RED physical interface with the Nextion display and an ESP8266 to control outputs. Feel free to take a look.

The ESP32 touch sensor development kit, ESP32-Sense Kit, is used for evaluating and developing ESP32 touch sensor system. ESP32-Sense Kit consists of one motherboard and multiple daughterboards. The motherboard contains a display unit, a main control unit and a debug unit. The daughterboards have touch electrodes in different combinations or shapes, such as linear slider, wheel slider, matrix buttons and spring buttons, depending on the application scenarios. Users can design and add their own daughterboards for special usage cases.

ESP-WROOM-32 based development board with SH1106 OLED display (128×64 pixels), RJ-45 Ethernet connector, CAN-bus connector, Micro USB connector, USB-to-UART bridge, LiPo battery connector and charging circuit.

ESP32 development board with ePaper display, TI PCM5102A DAC, ICS43434 MEMS Microphone, CP2102N USB-to-UART bridge, microSD card slot, and LiPo charger.

2× Ethernet (optional), 1× Serial Port RS-232/485, OLED 0.96″ 128×64 (optional), power supply with UPS (optional), U.FL (I-PEX) antenna mount(s), and ExCard extension modules support.