types of lcd display for arduino brands

The Arduino board has a wide variety of compatible displays that you can use in your electronic projects. In most projects, it’s very useful to give the user some sort of feedback from the Arduino.

With the TFT display you can display colorful images or graphics. This module has a resolution of 480 x 320. This module includes the SD card socket and SPI FLASH circuit.

This is a tiny display with just 1 x 0.96 Inch. This display has a black background, and displays characters in white. There are other similar displays that can show the characters in other colors.

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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?

Arduino-related projects are very popular and, like Raspberry Pi, it is one of the most used Free Hardware projects among companies. That is why we are going to talk about one of the most popular combinations among Arduino users: LCD + Arduino.

The LCD display is an increasingly economical and accessible accessory, which makes it a great option to accompany our Arduino board. But Can an LCD screen be used with our Arduino board? What projects can be used with LCD and Arduino, is this combination worth using?

Novice users are unaware of what LCD stands for, even though they will have seen it more than once in their lifetime. LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display, or what comes to be Liquid Crystal Display. A small or large screen that many of us have known in various devices such as alarm clocks, clock screens, calculators, etc ... Endless electronic devices that are expanded thanks to the combination of LCD + Arduino and Free Hardware.

LCD screens are compatible with any Free Hardware, including Arduino Project boards, although they require that the boards have certain connectors or pins to make the connection between the electronics board and the LCD screen.

A priori, there is no impediment to using different LCD screen sizes. In other words, the same Arduino board can use a 5-inch, 20 “LCD screen or a 5 × 2 character size, to speak of a small size. But we must be aware thatArduino board is not the same as a graphics card or motherboard, so the message to be displayed on a screen will not work the same on a small screen as on a large screen, as long as it is the same Arduino board.

If you have enough pins and pins compatible with the above, LCD screen will work perfectly with Arduino board. So it is always advisable to check the pins of both devices to make sure that the connection exists. In any case, it is rare for the Arduino board that cannot be connected to an lcd display and in case of having such a situation, there are different lcd modules on the market that are easily connected to Arduino and whose cost is quite affordable.

El Line LCD is a type of screen that shows information through lines. The information is situated in lines and we cannot get out of that frame. This type of LCD is the most widely used, economical and well-known but it is also the type of lcd that gives less play, since it only shows certain information and is usually just text.

El dot lcd It works almost the same as the previous type of lcd, but unlike the previous one, in the lcd by points we have a matrix of points. Thus, in this type of lcd we can place the text and even images anywhere on the lcd screen. What"s more we can have several font sizes within the same lcd screen, something that does not happen in the lcd display of lines, whose size must always be the same.

El OLED display It is for many a type of display of their own while for others it is within the types of lcd. The OLED Display is a screen that shows us information but its construction is different from that of the LCD screen since uses led diodes with organic components for its creation. Unlike the previous types, OLED displays offer higher resolution, color and lower energy consumption. Like computer monitors or dot lcd, OLED screens use the matrix of dots or pixels (since we can use several colors on the same display) to display content.

El LED or LCD Led display is similar to OLED Display, but led diodes do not contain organic elements. Its performance is not as high as the OLED display but it does offer more resolution than the dot LCD screen and offers color.

El TFT display is the latest type of lcd on the market. We can say that the TFT display uses pixels like computer monitors or televisions and that we can emit any type of information through these screens. Its energy consumption is higher than any of the previous types hence small sizes are used. The size of these displays is measured in inches unlike some of the other types of displays. They are measured by characters or by screen width.

Thanks to online commerce we can find countless models of lcd displays, but only a few are the most popular. This popularity is due to its easy acquisition, its price, its performance or simply its quality.. Here we talk about these models:

This display comes from the old Nokia 5110 mobile phones. The LCD of these mobiles outperformed the mobile and the company has continued to sell this display for its own use. The screen is monochrome and is Lineas LCD type. The Nokia 5110 display offers 48 rows and 84 columns. Its power is such that it offers the ability to view images, although not efficiently. Its performance is very good although we will need to use backlighting to be able to correctly view the screen, in general it is usually accompanied by this backlighting although there may be modules that lack this function. The display uses a Philips PCD8544 driver. The Nokia 5110 LCD screen can be found at shops for 1,8 euros.

The Hitachi HD44780 LCD It is a module created by the manufacturer Hitachi. The lcd panel is monochrome and is line type. We can find a model with 2 lines of 16 characters each and another model with 4 lines of 20 characters each. We usually find the Hitachi HD44780 LCD display in any store but it may also happen that we only find the Hitachi HD44780 controller without a screen, the price can help us in this situation, the cost being screen plus controller for 1,70 euros and only the 0,6 euro driver.

This lcd display is OLED type. The I2C OLED LCD is a one-inch size monochrome OLED screen that connects to the Arduino via the I2C protocol, this protocol uses a bidirectional bus that allows us to save pins, being necessary four pins in front of the necessary ones previously mentioned. The driver for this LCD screen is generic so we can use free libraries for its use. The price of this model is not as cheap as the previous models but if it is affordable by many users, we can find for 10 euros a unit.

The E-Ink LCD screen uses electronic ink to display information. Like the rest of the models, uses the I2C protocol to communicate with Arduino. The screens are of the TFT type but using electronic ink which makes consumption considerably lower but without losing resolution. Although there are no color screens (at the moment), they are all in black and gray scale.

As a curiosity about this model of lcd screens, we have to say that price and size are united. We can find different sizes and the bigger the size, the more expensive the screen. Thus, 1 or 2,5 inch E-Ink screens They have a price of 25 euros per unit. The larger size panels can reach 1.000 euros per unit.

The connection between an LCD screen and Arduino is very simple. In principle we have to follow the pins mentioned above and connect them to the Arduino board. The connection diagram would be the following:

But it is not the only thing we have to take into account to connect the LCD screen to Arduino. What"s more we have to use a library that will help us to give the program that we create the necessary code to make it work correctly with the screen. This bookstore it"s called LiquidCrystal.h and it can be obtained for free throughthe official Arduino website. This library must be used like the rest of the libraries, invoking it at the beginning of the code as follows:

Continuing with the above, we have to ask ourselves if it is really convenient to have an LCD screen and Arduino for our personal project or project. Personally, I think that for certain projects it is necessary and for the rest of them it is something more personal than necessary. For example, we can talk about the latest models of 3D printers, models that only add in some cases the LCD display and nothing else, but the price of the model is significantly more expensive.

In these cases I do not think that an LCD display is needed, but this is not the case in certain projects where the LCD display is very important. Examples of the latter are projects such as watches, a game console or simply a GPS locator. Projects that need to have a graphical interface to function effectively. What we say may be silly, especially for the most expert users, but any component can make any project more expensive and even make it unviable. Hence, it is important to assess whether our project should have an LCD screen or not.

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The difference between those two displays is that the cheaper one is the basic type of a LCD module. You have to find a library (or create one) to draw lines, text, etc. Also if you have troubles running it, I guess your only friend will be google.

The display from 4DSystems has a graphic processor (as oppose to a graphic controller) and that LCD module can run on it"s own without Arduino. The company provides an IDE where you can basically drag and drop buttons, pictures etc and not worry how it will be drawn. The LCD module also has GPIOs, I2C, multiple SPI and Serial channels, analog inputs, timers, etc. The company also provides support (not sure how good or bad it is) and probably a better warranty. I assume you can drive the display the same way as the cheap one (e.g. via SPI) but it"s processor would be bored while your Arduino sweating while trying to draw a straight line. So I don"t know what your project is but if you just need to hook up a few buttons, maybe read some analog inputs or some other basic things then the display can do it on it"s own. The disadvantage is that you have to learn a new programming language (whatever they use to program the LCD) but I guess it should not be too hard (especially if you"re a developer). Anyway, hopefully that explains the price difference a bit.

are you ok how fast is it gonna draw? Btw. you did not mention what arduino you want to use, if it"s one of the AVR ones, like Uno, Mega, Mini Pro,... then drawing on an 7" display (assuming 800x480) will in general be slow...but it might be ok for you so it depends on what you are after...

maybe type of the LCD (if viewing angles matter to you), the cheapest ones are not really great when you look at them from an angle (black becomes gray etc.)

Makerfocus shop provides many kinds of top brands about open source hardwares .  Such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Nvidia, M5Stack, Orange Pi, ESP8266, ESP32, and other related electronic goodies from all around the globe!

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In this article, let us see a list of Display Devices compatible with Arduino. These range from simple character displays to big graphical displays with touchscreen capabilities. Use this tutorial as a comparison of Arduino Display Devices which you can use in your DIY Project.

A Display is an output device used to present information in visual form. Using a Display device in your Arduino or any other DIY Project is definitely an advantage as you can easily view the data / information on the display instead of, say, the serial monitor.

There are several types of Display Devices available in the market that are compatible with Arduino with nice libraries. But choosing the right display for the project is an important task as you have to consider several aspects like price, size, resolution, ease-of-use, availability of libraries etc.

I collected a list of some of the commonly used Arduino compatible Display Devices. I also added links to tutorials for that particular display device using Arduino. Take a look at the list and I hope it helps in narrowing down the right display for your next Arduino Project.

Perhaps the most commonly used Display Device with Arduino is the 16×2 LCD. It is an alphanumeric character display which means that this LCD is capable of displaying only numbers and characters (and very few custom characters).

The numbers 16×2 represents the number of characters (16) per row and total number of rows (2). There is also a slightly bigger version of this display called the 20×4 LCD. As expected, it has 4 rows and 20 characters per row.

Usually, the 16×2 Character LCD (and its bigger brother the 20×4 LCD) come with a backlight. Blue and Green backlight colours are very common. Both the 16×2 LCD and 20×4 LCD come with 16 pins. The following table describes the pins of a 16×2 LCD.

8-bit or 4-bit Parallel Communication is the only way for Arduino to communicate with a 16×2 LCD. Since this interface takes up a lot of Arduino’s pins, PCF8574 based I2C add-on boards are developed for 16×2 LCD.

Using I2C based LCD reduces the required pins to just two (SCL an SDA of I2C). I made dedicated tutorial on “Interfacing 16×2 LCD with Arduino” and also on “How to Connect I2C LCD with Arduino”.

The next useful display device for Arduino is the monochrome OLED Display. OLED Displays have self-illuminating pixels i.e., each pixel is capable of producing its own light. So, there is no need for any backlight.

Coming to the communication, OLED Displays are available in two interface options: SPI and I2C. Both look very similar except that pins are different in both these devices.

The advantage of OLED over traditional Character LCDs is that it is a Graphical Display, which means, it is very easy to display bitmap images and characters with different fonts.

Originally developed for use in Nokia Mobile Phones, the Nokia 5110 LCD is slowly becoming a popular choice for Arduino Projects. It has a resolution of 84×48 pixels and it is a Graphical LCD.

It is built around PCD8544 LCD Controller and uses SPI like Serial Communication Interface for data transfer. If you are interested in the pinout of Nokia 5110 LCD, then take a look at the following table.

For Backlight, there are several options like Red, Blue, Green and White. I made dedicated tutorial on “Interfacing Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino”. Check it out if you are interested.

Since the Nokia 5110 is a graphical LCD, it is very easy to design a Graphical User Interface for your application, like a Menu System. Do check the “How to Design an Arduino Nokia 5110 LCD Menu System?” tutorial.

The next useful display device in the list is the 128×64 Graphical LCD. As the name suggests, it has a resolution of 128×64 pixels, which is greater than a Nokia 5110 LCD. Also, the size of the LCD is big, with a lot of real estate to work with.

If you look at the pins of a typical 128×64 LCD, then it is very similar to a 16×2 LCD (but with couple extra pins). Essentially, the interface is also similar to that of a 16×2 LCD i.e., you can use a 4-bit or 8-bit parallel communication.

It is very important to know the LCD Controller used in the LCD Device as there are many options available and you have to select the appropriate Controller in the code. Some of the common controllers are:

Technically not a display device like the previous devices in the list, the 8×8 LED Matrix is an interesting visual device for sure. An 8×8 Matrix LED is a two-dimensional array of LEDs, which can display numbers, characters, simple graphical figures etc.

Hence, dedicated Display Driver ICs like MAX7219 are used to build modules around 8×8 LED Matrix so that Arduino (or other Microcontrollers) can communicate with MAX7219 through SPI.

It is very easy to cascade multiple such modules to increase the pixel count. Visit the “Arduino 8×8 LED Matrix” tutorial to find out more about 8×8 LED Matrix.

A Seven Segment Display or 7 Segment Display is another simple display device that you can use with Arduino. If your application requires displaying only numbers like Time or Quantity, then a 7 Segment Display is the cheapest and easiest option.

As the name suggests, a 7-Segment Display consists of, well, 7 LEDs arranged in “Segments” to form an “8”. It is very easy to display digits from 0 to 9. Depending on the internal orientation of the LEDs, a 7-Segment Display can be either a Common Cathode Device or a Common Anode Device.

One common configuration of 7 Segment Display is its availability as 4 – Digit Modules. Individual Seven Segment Displays also consists of a decimal point as a part of it.

For more information on 7 Segment Displays, visit, “Arduino 7 Segment Display Interface” and for 4 – digit 7 – Segment Display, visit, “Arduino 4-Digit 7-Segment LED Display”.

The next two Arduino Display Devices are advanced modules (and even costly). If you want to create intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) between the system and the end user, then a colourful TFT LCD Display is your best option.

In normal TFT LCD Displays, you can only display the information. In order to interact with the system, you need additional hardware like a Rotary Encoder or Push Buttons. The TFT Touchscreen LCD Display solves this problem by integrating touchscreen on to the TFT Display.

NOTE: I did not implement any project using TFT LCD Display and TFT Touchscreen LCD Display. I will update the links for tutorial once I complete those projects.

This was a brief look at 8 of the most common Arduino Display Devices to integrate in your project. Interfacing a Display Device with Arduino will certainly give your project a new look and finish, whether it is a simple Alarm Clock, Weather Station or a complex Menu Interface.

Today, among the various projects with Arduino used in the market, those that involve integration with LCD displays for the display of information stand out.

In this case, the I2C module needs to be connected to the display to have all its communication reduced to four wires: two for power and two for signal.

In order not to make a mistake in the numbering of the pinout, it is important to carefully observe the characteristics of each pin and their locations on the Arduino.

Meanwhile, pin 5 (R/W), connected to GND, demonstrates the read and write signal of the display, and pin 6 (E) serves to enable or disable the signal.

In addition, pins 15 (LED+) and 16 (LED-) will be responsible for supplying power to the LEDs at the bottom of the display. It is possible to connect pin 15 using:Using 2 resistors of 220 ohms in parallel;

With the proper connections, it"s time to program the Arduino by connecting it to the computer and opening the official Arduino IDE in its updated version.

Furthermore, despite being highly efficient, LCD technology is not new to the market, which lowers its cost in relation to other displays with similar benefits.