low power lcd display arduino supplier

I"m drooling over Sharp Memory LCD, but they are pricey. I mean $40 is not terrible for one, but I need to get a bunch for battery powered LCD boards I"m working on

From my breadboard tests ATmega328p board w/ Nokia 5110 is using 140-170uA (depending on number of characters on display) when chip is sleeping which is not bad at all, but I want to explore all alternatives...

Alas I don"t know of a display that matches your requirements (price/power) and apart from an e-ink or memory LCD that updates vary rarely I don"t think you will ever get one to run for a year on 2x AAA batteries.

The reflective version (without backlight) of the DOGS102 might meet your requirements. According to the datasheet, the current will be 250uA for LCD and LCD-Controller (if I interpret the datasheet correctly).

The reflective version (without backlight) of the DOGS102 might meet your requirements. According to the datasheet, the current will be 250uA for LCD and LCD-Controller (if I interpret the datasheet correctly).

Alas I don"t know of a display that matches your requirements (price/power) and apart from an e-ink or memory LCD that updates vary rarely I don"t think you will ever get one to run for a year on 2x AAA batteries.

Yeah you could be right. Besides display I forgot that I need to keep radio module awake, that eats a lot of power. But how they heck do they do this with commercial temperature/humidity devices? I have one that"s been running for 2 years on single AA battery

Yeah you could be right. Besides display I forgot that I need to keep radio module awake, that eats a lot of power. But how they heck do they do this with commercial temperature/humidity devices? I have one that"s been running for 2 years on single AA battery

My commercial module only last about 6 months on 2x AAA. It would probably last longer without the LCD to display temperature/humidity and flash an LED every time it transmits (every 30 seconds). Your doing very well with yours, must have one of them plutonium batteries.

Note that these do not use the highly multiplexed display system with the bias ladder of the graphical or 1602/ 2004 devices, they are generally one pin per segment so the electronics is far more efficient.

Darn. I"ve been searching and it seems everyone in Arduinoland uses OLEDs and TFTs. I want a 1" display that I can run off of a coin battery for a year. I know they exist, I own a bunch of them. But the best thing I"ve found draws 125uA.

That"s a 2.2" display. I"m looking for a 1" display, like many of the little OLEDs you can buy on eBay for $5 or less. But with 1/500th the power consumption. My $10 wristwatch has a display like that.

It appears that you simply haven"t weighed up the real issues. If you finally get a display with 1/500th the consumption of what ever, all you get is that but, if that is what you need, the real problem isn"t the display and never was. It"s the Arduino that drives it.

I"m not planning on using an Arduino. Why would you assume that? If the display drew 20uA instead of 10mA it would still be the major consumer of current.

Fair enough. What"s an Arduino? AVR (and non-AVR) chips are also discussed in this forum. But even an official Arduino board like the Pro Mini, with the regulator isolated, is capable of drawing a very low average current.

This graphic LCD module acts as a shield for Arduino Uno-style microcontrollers. The pins on the carrier board match up to the Arduino Uno"s ports, so the module simply presses on and is fully and correctly connected. Plus, this carrier board is able to be connected to either a 3.3v logic level or a 5v logic level device. (Read our blog post if you have questions about logic level.)

This module is also available with a white-on-blue graphic display, or as a fully built kit with an included Seeeduino (Arduino Uno clone) loaded with code to demonstrate the graphic display.

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?

This is a very low-power LCD clock, based on an AVR128DA48, capable of running for over three years from a CR2032 button cell, or for ever from a solar cell:

Every minute it also briefly displays the temperature, using the AVR128DA48"s on-chip temperature sensor, and the battery voltage, by using the ADC to read its own supply voltage. There"s also an I2C connection so you can add an external sensor, for example to show the humidity in addition to the other readings.

Although liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are relatively old technology, they still offer several advantages over newer types of display, including low power, low cost, and readability.

I recently bought some Densitron LCD displays on eBay for a few pounds/dollars, and I"d been wanting to try building a low-power clock around them, to see just how low I could get the power consumption. The displays are a standard type, available with compatible pinouts from several manufacturers. They are called static (as opposed to multiplexed), which means that every segment comes to a separate pin on the edge connector. This makes 28 pins for the segments plus three decimal points, a colon, and a common pin, adding up to 33 pins altogether. The displays I"ve found usually have two common pins, and also typically have other special-purpose segments, such as a minus sign, in a 40-pin package.

The displays are usually clear, but when you apply a voltage of about 3.3V between a segment and the common line the segment turns black. The displays I"m using have a reflective backing; they are also available with a translucent backing so you can add a backlight behind them.

There"s one catch; you can"t use a DC voltage to turn on the segments, because this would cause electrolysis to occur which would slowly degrade the display. The solution is to use AC by switching the polarity across the segment at a low frequency; 32Hz is usually recommended. Fortunately this is easy to do in software

Most 40-pin, 33mm row spacing displays should be compatible with this board; here are some I"ve found. These all have 4 digits and 3 decimal points on pins 5 to 27, 29 to 32, and 34 to 37, and commons on 1 and 40, plus a few extra symbols as shown:

The circuit is less complicated than it looks. Each segment simply connects to one I/O line on the processor. All the segments for one digit go to the same port, with the decimal point going to bit 7, segment A going to bit 6, through to segment G going to bit 0 (with a couple of exceptions explained below).

Because of the number of interconnections I didn"t fancy prototyping this project by hand, but went straight to designing a PCB in Eagle, and I sent it to PCBWay for manufacture. I tried to make the PCB as general purpose as possible. It caters for any of the displays in the above table; to select which of the extra symbols you want to display you need to fit an 0Ω resistor to the board to act as a link.

The processor is an AVR128DA48 in a TQFP-48 package, but the PCB would work with a range of other 48-pin processors. The AVR128DB48 would be suitable, as would the lower memory versions of these two devices, down to the AVR32DA48 and AVR32DB48. However, you only save a few pence/cents by choosing the lower memory versions, so I don"t really see the point.

The ATmega4809 and its lower-memory siblings, down to the ATmega809, are pin compatible with the DA and DB chips in the same packages, and so could also be used on this board; the only restriction is that the pins I"ve used for I2C, PF2 and PF3, only support slave I2C on the ATmega4809.

Alternatively, if you want to power the clock from a 3V solar cell there are holes to allow you to fit a supercapacitor in place of the coin cell; I used a PowerStor 0.47F 5V one

The PCB also includes a 4-pin JST PH socket, providing an I2C interface compatible with Adafruit"s STEMMA system or the Grove system. You can use this to connect a sensor to the board, for example to show the humidity as well as the time and temperature, or you could use it to make the board an I2C slave so it can be used as an I2C display for other projects.

There"s no multiplexing, so to display a segment pattern we just need to write the appropriate value from the segment array, Char[0] to Char[11], to the port corresponding to the digit. Ports D, C, and A provide eight I/O lines each, so these map in a logical way to the seven segments and decimal point in digits 0 to 2. There"s a slight complexity with digit 3 because Port B only has six I/O lines available, so the segment corresponding to bit 6 is provided by PF5. The colon or other symbol is controlled by PF4.

The interrupt service routine first toggles all the I/O lines connected to the LCD segments, and the common connections. Every 32 calls, or every half second, it calculates the current time, and checks whether the buttons are pressed. If the MINS or HRS buttons are pressed it advances the time by a minute or an hour respectively. It then calls the routine DisplayTime() to update the time, or at the end of each minute it calls DisplayVoltage() to display the battery voltage for three seconds, followed by DisplayTemp() to display the temperature for three seconds:

DisplayTime() copies the digits representing the current time to the corresponding output ports, specified by Digit[0] to Digit[3]. It also flashes the colon:

Unlike earlier AVR microcontrollers, where you had to calibrate the temperature sensor, the AVR DA and DB series have been calibrated during manufacture and contain calibration parameters in ROM. The temperature display is therefore pretty accurate without any additional calibration.

The processor spends most of its time in power-down sleep mode, to save power, and is woken up by the 64Hz interrupt from the Real-Time Clock peripheral. I measured the average power consumption at 3.3V for four different clock frequencies:

Usually you"d expect the power consumption to increase with processor clock frequency, so at first sight these figures are puzzling. The explanation is that at higher clock frequencies the time taken to execute the interrupt service routine is shorter, allowing the processor to spend a higher proportion of the time asleep.

The 32.768kHz external crystal oscillator has a low-power mode, and selecting this reduced the average power consumption with a 24MHz clock from 9.5µA to 7.3µA. The AVR128DA48 datasheet doesn"t seem to mention any downside to choosing the low-power mode, so I used this setting.

With a 0.47F supercapacitor you can expect a current of 0.47A for 1 second. This gives an expected life of 0.47/7.3x10‑6/60/60 or about 18 hours, which I confirmed by testing it. This should be sufficient to keep the clock running overnight with a suitable solar cell providing power during daylight.

The HRS button doesn"t affect the seconds and minutes timing; this is designed to allow you to switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time without affecting the clock setting.

Compile the programs using Spence Konde"s Dx Core on GitHub. Choose the AVR DA-series (no bootloader) option under the DxCore heading on the Board menu. Check that the subsequent options are set as follows (ignore any other options):

Make a UPDI programmer from an Arduino Uno, or other ATmega328P-based board, as described in Make UPDI Programmer, and set the Programmer option to "jtag2updi".

(Note: For a follow-up project which uses a larger screen, click here: Building a 3.5 Digit Low Power LCD Module ) Introduction Sometimes a really simple, low power

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2. You’re right – the Sharp displays are expensive. Adafruit provides only the display for $45 (which I purchased and used for early prototyping). The NEWT includes the display plus:

That being said… $92 is a lot of money… so I’m all for people building their own – or better yet, building a better version. I’ll add a comment below with links to all the software (device and server side) and hardware designs.

A. I might use a NE555 to send a 1 HZ pulse to the display, and use a different RTC- as long as it was low cost, low power, and supported multiple alarms/timers. Or maybe I’d add a crystal to the ESP32 and use internal RTC (which is super inaccurate w/o an RTC).

C. I think I’d add a legit battery fuel monitor (I use a voltage monitoring chip right now, that goes HIGH when the batt voltage falls below 3.5V). There were few to no LiPO fuel gauge chips in stock when I launched NEWT