lcd screen arduino tutorial pricelist

In this Arduino touch screen tutorial we will learn how to use TFT LCD Touch Screen with Arduino. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

For this tutorial I composed three examples. The first example is distance measurement using ultrasonic sensor. The output from the sensor, or the distance is printed on the screen and using the touch screen we can select the units, either centimeters or inches.

The third example is a game. Actually it’s a replica of the popular Flappy Bird game for smartphones. We can play the game using the push button or even using the touch screen itself.

As an example I am using a 3.2” TFT Touch Screen in a combination with a TFT LCD Arduino Mega Shield. We need a shield because the TFT Touch screen works at 3.3V and the Arduino Mega outputs are 5 V. For the first example I have the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, then for the second example an RGB LED with three resistors and a push button for the game example. Also I had to make a custom made pin header like this, by soldering pin headers and bend on of them so I could insert them in between the Arduino Board and the TFT Shield.

Here’s the circuit schematic. We will use the GND pin, the digital pins from 8 to 13, as well as the pin number 14. As the 5V pins are already used by the TFT Screen I will use the pin number 13 as VCC, by setting it right away high in the setup section of code.

I will use the UTFT and URTouch libraries made by Henning Karlsen. Here I would like to say thanks to him for the incredible work he has done. The libraries enable really easy use of the TFT Screens, and they work with many different TFT screens sizes, shields and controllers. You can download these libraries from his website, RinkyDinkElectronics.com and also find a lot of demo examples and detailed documentation of how to use them.

After we include the libraries we need to create UTFT and URTouch objects. The parameters of these objects depends on the model of the TFT Screen and Shield and these details can be also found in the documentation of the libraries.

Next we need to define the fonts that are coming with the libraries and also define some variables needed for the program. In the setup section we need to initiate the screen and the touch, define the pin modes for the connected sensor, the led and the button, and initially call the drawHomeSreen() custom function, which will draw the home screen of the program.

So now I will explain how we can make the home screen of the program. With the setBackColor() function we need to set the background color of the text, black one in our case. Then we need to set the color to white, set the big font and using the print() function, we will print the string “Arduino TFT Tutorial” at the center of the screen and 10 pixels  down the Y – Axis of the screen. Next we will set the color to red and draw the red line below the text. After that we need to set the color back to white, and print the two other strings, “by HowToMechatronics.com” using the small font and “Select Example” using the big font.

Now we need to make the buttons functional so that when we press them they would send us to the appropriate example. In the setup section we set the character ‘0’ to the currentPage variable, which will indicate that we are at the home screen. So if that’s true, and if we press on the screen this if statement would become true and using these lines here we will get the X and Y coordinates where the screen has been pressed. If that’s the area that covers the first button we will call the drawDistanceSensor() custom function which will activate the distance sensor example. Also we will set the character ‘1’ to the variable currentPage which will indicate that we are at the first example. The drawFrame() custom function is used for highlighting the button when it’s pressed. The same procedure goes for the two other buttons.

So the drawDistanceSensor() custom function needs to be called only once when the button is pressed in order to draw all the graphics of this example in similar way as we described for the home screen. However, the getDistance() custom function needs to be called repeatedly in order to print the latest results of the distance measured by the sensor.

Here’s that function which uses the ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance and print the values with SevenSegNum font in green color, either in centimeters or inches. If you need more details how the ultrasonic sensor works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. Back in the loop section we can see what happens when we press the select unit buttons as well as the back button.

Ok next is the RGB LED Control example. If we press the second button, the drawLedControl() custom function will be called only once for drawing the graphic of that example and the setLedColor() custom function will be repeatedly called. In this function we use the touch screen to set the values of the 3 sliders from 0 to 255. With the if statements we confine the area of each slider and get the X value of the slider. So the values of the X coordinate of each slider are from 38 to 310 pixels and we need to map these values into values from 0 to 255 which will be used as a PWM signal for lighting up the LED. If you need more details how the RGB LED works you can check my particular tutorialfor that. The rest of the code in this custom function is for drawing the sliders. Back in the loop section we only have the back button which also turns off the LED when pressed.

In order the code to work and compile you will have to include an addition “.c” file in the same directory with the Arduino sketch. This file is for the third game example and it’s a bitmap of the bird. For more details how this part of the code work  you can check my particular tutorial. Here you can download that file:

In this Arduino tutorial we will learn how to connect and use an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)with Arduino. LCD displays like these are very popular and broadly used in many electronics projects because they are great for displaying simple information, like sensors data, while being very affordable.

You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below. It includes everything you need to know about using an LCD character display with Arduino, such as, LCD pinout, wiring diagram and several example codes.

An LCD character display is a unique type of display that can only output individual ASCII characters with fixed size. Using these individual characters then we can form a text.

The number of the rectangular areas define the size of the LCD. The most popular LCD is the 16×2 LCD, which has two rows with 16 rectangular areas or characters. Of course, there are other sizes like 16×1, 16×4, 20×4 and so on, but they all work on the same principle. Also, these LCDs can have different background and text color.

It has 16 pins and the first one from left to right is the Groundpin. The second pin is the VCCwhich we connect the 5 volts pin on the Arduino Board. Next is the Vo pin on which we can attach a potentiometer for controlling the contrast of the display.

Next, The RSpin or register select pin is used for selecting whether we will send commands or data to the LCD. For example if the RS pin is set on low state or zero volts, then we are sending commands to the LCD like: set the cursor to a specific location, clear the display, turn off the display and so on. And when RS pin is set on High state or 5 volts we are sending data or characters to the LCD.

Next comes the R/W pin which selects the mode whether we will read or write to the LCD. Here the write mode is obvious and it is used for writing or sending commands and data to the LCD. The read mode is used by the LCD itself when executing the program which we don’t have a need to discuss about it in this tutorial.

After all we don’t have to worry much about how the LCD works, as the Liquid Crystal Library takes care for almost everything. From the Arduino’s official website you can find and see the functions of the library which enable easy use of the LCD. We can use the Library in 4 or 8 bit mode. In this tutorial we will use it in 4 bit mode, or we will just use 4 of the 8 data pins.

We will use just 6 digital input pins from the Arduino Board. The LCD’s registers from D4 to D7 will be connected to Arduino’s digital pins from 4 to 7. The Enable pin will be connected to pin number 2 and the RS pin will be connected to pin number 1. The R/W pin will be connected to Ground and theVo pin will be connected to the potentiometer middle pin.

We can adjust the contrast of the LCD by adjusting the voltage input at the Vo pin. We are using a potentiometer because in that way we can easily fine tune the contrast, by adjusting input voltage from 0 to 5V.

Yes, in case we don’t have a potentiometer, we can still adjust the LCD contrast by using a voltage divider made out of two resistors. Using the voltage divider we need to set the voltage value between 0 and 5V in order to get a good contrast on the display. I found that voltage of around 1V worked worked great for my LCD. I used 1K and 220 ohm resistor to get a good contrast.

There’s also another way of adjusting the LCD contrast, and that’s by supplying a PWM signal from the Arduino to the Vo pin of the LCD. We can connect the Vo pin to any Arduino PWM capable pin, and in the setup section, we can use the following line of code:

It will generate PWM signal at pin D11, with value of 100 out of 255, which translated into voltage from 0 to 5V, it will be around 2V input at the Vo LCD pin.

First thing we need to do is it insert the Liquid Crystal Library. We can do that like this: Sketch > Include Library > Liquid Crystal. Then we have to create an LC object. The parameters of this object should be the numbers of the Digital Input pins of the Arduino Board respectively to the LCD’s pins as follow: (RS, Enable, D4, D5, D6, D7). In the setup we have to initialize the interface to the LCD and specify the dimensions of the display using the begin()function.

The cursor() function is used for displaying underscore cursor and the noCursor() function for turning off. Using the clear() function we can clear the LCD screen.

So, we have covered pretty much everything we need to know about using an LCD with Arduino. These LCD Character displays are really handy for displaying information for many electronics project. In the examples above I used 16×2 LCD, but the same working principle applies for any other size of these character displays.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. Feel free to ask any question in the comments section below and don’t forget to check out my full collection of 30+ Arduino Projects.

In this guide we’re going to show you how you can use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire the display, write text, draw shapes and display images on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT is a colorful display with 128 x 160 color pixels. The display can load images from an SD card – it has an SD card slot at the back. The following figure shows the screen front and back view.

This module uses SPI communication – see the wiring below . To control the display we’ll use the TFT library, which is already included with Arduino IDE 1.0.5 and later.

The TFT display communicates with the Arduino via SPI communication, so you need to include the SPI library on your code. We also use the TFT library to write and draw on the display.

In which “Hello, World!” is the text you want to display and the (x, y) coordinate is the location where you want to start display text on the screen.

The 1.8 TFT display can load images from the SD card. To read from the SD card you use the SD library, already included in the Arduino IDE software. Follow the next steps to display an image on the display:

In this guide we’ve shown you how to use the 1.8 TFT display with the Arduino: display text, draw shapes and display images. You can easily add a nice visual interface to your projects using this display.

Since the use of an LCD requires many microcontroller pins, we will reduce that number using serial communication, which is basically sending "packages" of data one after another, using only two pins of our microcontroller , pins SDA and SCL which are the analog pins A4 and A5 of the Arduino NANO or pro mini.

First of all we connect i2c pins module as shown in the schematic. Power the LCD module to 5 volts and connect the ground as well. The SDA pin of the i2c module conected to arduinio A5 and the SCL pin to A4. We connect the arduino to USB and we are ready to program. In order to make the LCD work we need to inport the LCD library for arduino.

In this tutorial, we will display the custom characters on an LCD 16×2. Liquid crystal display (LCDs) offer a convenient and inexpensive way to provide a user interface for a project.

By far the most popular LCD used is the text panel based on the Hitachi HD44780 chip. This displays two or four lines of text, with 16 or 20 characters per line (32 and 40 character versions are also available, but usually at much higher prices).

We want to define and display custom characters or symbols (glyphs) that we have created. The symbols we want to display are not predefined in the LCD character memory.

A library for driving text LCD displays is provided with Arduino, and you can print text on your LCD easily as on the serial monitor because of LCD and serial share the same underlying print function.

To display custom characters on LCD, we must first know about the LCD dot matrix means pixels in LCD. There are 5 pixels in rows and 8 pixels in columns means every character is a combination of 5*8 dots.

The LiquidCrystal library enables you to create up to eight custom characters, which can be printed as character codes 0 through 8. Each character on the screen is drawn on a grid of 5 x 8 pixels.

Now We want to combine two or more custom characters to print larger fonts / double-height characters than a single character; for example, double-height numbers on the screen.

Each big number is built from six of these glyphs, three forming the upper half of the big digit and three forming the lower half. BiDigitsTop and bigDigitsBot are arrays defining which custom glyph is used for the top and bottom rows on the LCD screen.

You can find the previous article here. It contains a description of the LCD module, shows you how to connect the display to your Arduino UNO board and describes the basic rules of operating it using the software. Still, it needs to be admitted here that there is only a limited number of applications for an LCD alone, because in the case of such a simple LCD module no settings can be entered. To do so, you need a keyboard, which we will discuss in detail in one of the future articles, but now let us use a ready-made solution from the Arduino ecosystem – a board from Olimex – SHIELDLCD16x2.

This is a shield board which extends Arduino capabilities, equipped with an LCD module (2 lines of 16 characters each), 4 buttons and 8 additional GPIO lines. On the board, there is a PIC processor which communicates with Arduino UNO via the TWI interface. With access to a library of functions, operating this module with a built-in microcontroller should not cause any major problems. Let"s start with preparing the module for operation.

There are two steps to prepare the module for work: hardware and software. The first one is simply to plug the shield into the Arduino UNO board. The second one requires you to install a library of module operating functions.

To install the library, go to the module manufacturer"s website i.e. Olimex. Then, in the search box (next to the Search button) enter the part of the module name "LCD16x2". (Figure 1). Click on the Search button. When this text was being created, the search retuned two results – please, select "SHIELD-LCD16x2".

Under the description of the module, you can find the "SOFTWARE" section (figure 2). Each line of text in this section is also a link to a file that can be downloaded from the Olimex website. At this point, we are looking for the link saying: "OLIMEXINO-328 + SHIELD-LCD16x2 – a library and set of demo examples".

Download the ZIP file available at this link to your computer. Of course, it is worth having a look at the available examples, but for our needs it is enough to install the library saved in the LCD16x2 catalogue.

The Arduino IDE allows for various different ways of installing libraries. In this case, the easiest way is to upload the sources to the project directory, which also contains a libraries subdirectory. The project directory is created during the installation of Arduino IDE, and Windows usually places it (in the Polish language version) in subdirectory Ten Komputer → Dokumenty → Arduino. To add the library sources to today"s example, just move the LCD16x2 directory to the libraries folder. Once you"ve done that, launch the Arduino IDE.

Before getting started with your own program, you should read examples of using the LCD16x2.h library of functions available in the Examples directory. It is a much more effective method of learning than reading documentation, although it is worth remembering about the latter as well.

As mentioned before, the shield communicates with the UNO board using a serial interface. It"s easy to guess that the functions described in the previous article must be modified, because they used a parallel, 4-bit interface. As you can imagine, the microcontroller on the shield board communicates with the LCD character display module in the same way, but our Arduino UNO cannot "see" the display, and the control is done indirectly. Therefore, start the program by adding libraries to support the appropriate serial interface and the display module mounted on the shield board.

To make it simple, in order not to use the long library name, it is recommended to assign to it the lcd alias. We will use it by writing the name of the library function after the dot.

As you remember from the previous article, programs created for Arduino are divided into two parts: the initialization function and the infinite loop. The commands of the first one are written in the void setup() function, and of the latter – in the void loop() function. The commands contained within the setup function are executed only once, while those within the infinite loop are executed throughout the program.

The initialization function starts the TWI interface, clears the LCD screen, and turns on the display backlight at the maximum LED light intensity (0 parameter turns off the backlight).

Mask 0x01 corresponds to the first button on the left, while 0x08 corresponds to the first button on the right. The program numbers the buttons by giving the pressed variable a value corresponding to the conventional button number. Then, this number is shown on the LCD screen, at the position starting in the first row and the first column. The message is displayed only if the pressed value is different from 0. Otherwise, the message "No button" is displayed, indicating that no button is pressed. The message is terminated with three spaces so that when overlaid on "1 is pressed" (which is longer) the last characters of the caption are cleared.

The whole sketch is available in the resources attached to the article. Compile it and upload it to the Arduino UNO microcontroller memory using the Ctrl+U shortcut (Sketch → Upload).

Sometimes, using simple physical I/O with your Arduino is just not good enough. In these cases, a more sophisticated output method is required, and often, simple LCD screens are utilized for that purpose. These allow you to display short status messages, errors, results, and other information in an easy-to-understand and intuitive way. In this article, we’ll discuss how a standard LCD module works and how you can connect one to your Arduino!

All LCD modules that use the Hitachi HD44780 integrated circuit - or a similar compatible one - will work the same way. Luckily, that’s the majority of LCDs and modules that you can buy. Such devices will typically have the following pins that you need to connect:

Note that the anode and cathode connections may be positioned elsewhere or in a different order. If your LCD doesn"t have an integrated backlight, these pins may be omitted entirely.

You can write data to the control register to perform certain actions: for example, move the cursor on the display or clear the contents of the screen. Writing to the character register will display the matching character in the current cursor position.

The information for these operations is supplied by the data pins. Although there are eight connectors in total, it’ll suffice if you only use the last four lines to transmit data. This way, you can still use the most important features of the LCD and display most characters, while simultaneously saving four GPIO pins of your Arduino for other peripherals.

For these simple LCDs to work, you only have to connect the register-select, enable, and four data lines to the Arduino. The contrast control pin should be connected to a potentiometer to allow the users to adjust the contrast of the display:

If your display has a backlight, connect its anode and cathode to a power source, but don’t forget to use an appropriate resistor. In this case, the power is supplied by the Arduino.

Luckily, you don’t have to implement the communication protocol for an HD44780- compatible liquid crystal display yourself, because a simple-to-use library is included with every installation of the Arduino IDE. Therefore, you only need to import the LiquidCrystal library and use its functions to control the display:

Common LCD modules use a Hitachi HD44780- compatible controller, and therefore utilize the same connections and communication to drive the display with an Arduino. Those pins include the register-select, enable, and data lines. You can either connect all eight data pins to utilize all functions the display has to offer, or only use the last four lines (D4 to D7) to save some GPIO pins. Once the display is connected, you can utilize the LiquidCrystal library to conveniently communicate with it.

We have published quite a number of tutorials using different displays with the Arduino, with the most recent being the tutorial on displaying graphics on all kind of displays with Arduino. For today’s tutorial, we will look into achieving more with displays by implementing a menu based system with the Nokia 5110 LCD display and the Arduino. The menu is one of the easiest and most intuitive ways through which users interact with products that require navigation. From mobile phone to PCs, its applications are endless. Today we will explore how to add this cool feature to your Arduino project.

At the heart of today’s project is the Nokia 5110 LCD Display. The Nokia 5110 LCD is one of the most popular LCD display among makers. It was originally developed for use as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. The display uses a low power CMOS LCD controller/driver, the PCD8544, which drives the 84×48px graphics display. In a normal state, the display consumes about 6 to 7mA which makes it quite ideal for low power devices. We have published quite a number of tutorials on this display that might help you understand how to drive such a display.

To showcase how to create the menu on a display with the Arduino, we will build a simple demo menu with three pages.  To navigate through the menu, we will use 3x push buttons. The first to scroll up, the second to scroll down and the third one to select a highlighted option. The first screen/page of the menu will serve as the home page and will host the options that open the next two screens/pages. The second page will open after the first menu option on the homepage has been selected. Users will be able to change the contrast of the display using the up and down push buttons to increase or reduce it respectively. By pressing the select button, users will be able to go back to the home page. The second option on the homepage displays the third page, where users will be able to turn the backlight of the display on/off by pressing the select item button.

To make the schematics easy to follow, a pin map of the connection between the Arduino Uno and the Nokia 5110, which isthe major component, is shown below.

Looking at the schematics, you will see that the push buttons are connected to the Arduino without the common pull-up or pull-down resistors. This is because we will use the Arduino’s internal pull-up resistor. You can read more about using pull-up/down resistors here. If you have any challenges understanding the concept, do reach out to me via the comment section.

To be fair, the code for today’s tutorial is a little bit complex and while I will do my best to break it down and ensure you understand the basics, it might take you building your own menu to fully grab the concept. The code for today is heavily dependent on two major libraries; The Adafruit GFX library and the Adafruit Nokia 5110 LCD Library. The Adafruit GFX library is probably one of the libraries we use the most in our tutorials. It makes it easy to display graphics and perform simple animations on supported displays. The Nokia 5110 LCD library, on the other hand, reduces the amount of work and code required to interact with the LCD.

We start the code as with other sketches by including all the libraries required for the project which in this case, are the Adafruit GFX and Nokia 5110 LCD libraries.

Next, we write the void setup function. Here we declare all the pins to which the push buttons are connected as inputs and set digital pin 7 as output since the Light pin of the LCD is connected to it. This pin will be used to turn the backlight on/off later on.

After setting the pin modes, we initialize serial communication, initialize the screen, and set the screen contrast to 50 which serves as a default value (to be varied later using the menu buttons) and use the display.display() function to apply the changes.

Next, we write the void loop function. We start the void loop function by calling the drawmenu() function which contains the code to create the menu objects on the screen.

The state of the buttons is then fed into a series of if-else statements which checks which button was pressed and which of the screens is currently being displayed to determine what action is done next. For instance, the first if statement checks if the menu is currently on page 1 and if the up button is pressed. If this is the case, it then checks the position of the menu cursor and adjusts it accordingly.

Go through the schematics one more time to ensure everything is connected as it should be, then connect the Arduino to your computer and upload the code. After a couple of seconds, you should see the menu displayed on the LCD and it should respond to the push buttons when pressed.

That’s it for today’s tutorial. Thanks for reading. While this is certainly not a project that is useful on its own, it will be a fantastic feature to add to your existing or new projects. Feel free to reach out via the comment section with your questions, suggestions, and comments on today’s tutorial. I will try to reply to them as soon as possible.