lcd display c code for sale

The CFA533-***-KC series is a 16x2 I2C LCD with keypad. The I2C interface allows you to use just two lines (SDA & SCL) to have bi-directional communication with the I2C LCD. Other devices can also share those two I2C control lines with the LCD. Only 4 wires are needed to connect this I2C LCD: power, ground, SDA (I2C Serial DAta) and SCL (I2C Serial CLock).

The CFA533 can run on 3.3v to 5.0v directly, with no changes needed, so you do not need to do any level translation between your embedded processor and the I2C LCD. Simply power the CFA533 from the same supply as your processor and the I2C signal levels will match up.

Using only one address on your I2C bus, you can add all the elements that you need for your front panel. The CFA533 I2C LCD can also read up to 32 DS18B20 digital temperature sensors, giving you an easy way to integrate temperature sensing over the I2C bus. No additional firmware or pins are needed on the host system.

This CFA533-TFH variant features crisp dark letters against a white, backlit background. The keypad has a matching white LED backlight. Since the LCD is a backlit positive FSTN, the CFA533-TFH I2C LCD is readable in direct sunlight, as well as complete darkness.

“Just received the 15 samples this morning and have already incorporated one in a prototype and initial impressions are very favorable… Thank you and your team for the speedy turn-around, despite all the hurdles we threw at you.”

“Just received the 15 samples this morning and have already incorporated one in a prototype and initial impressions are very favorable… Thank you and your team for the speedy turn-around, despite all the hurdles we threw at you.”

The uLCD-32PT(GFX) is a compact and cost effective all in one ‘SMART” display module using the latest state of the art Active Matrix LCD (TFT) technology with an embedded PICASO-GFX2 graphics controller that delivers ‘stand-alone’ functionality to any project.

The PICASO-GFX2 belongs to a family of processors powered by a highly optimised soft core virtual engine, E.V.E. (Extensible Virtual Engine). EVE is a proprietary, high performance virtual processor with an extensive byte-code instruction set optimised to execute compiled 4DGL programs. 4DGL (4D Graphics Language) was specifically developed from ground up for the EVE engine core. It is a high level language which is

4DGL allows the developer to write applications in a high level syntax similar to popular languages such as BASIC, C and Pascal and run it directly on the PICASO-GFX2 processor embedded in the uLCD-32PT module. It allows the user to take complete control of all available resources on that hardware platform such as the Serial Ports, Graphics LCD Display, uSD memory card, I/O pins, etc. This eliminates the need for an external host controller/processor to drive the uLCD-32PT module via serial commands. It provides the user complete control over the hardware module allowing them to quickly develop powerful applications.

Note: The module can be switched to a "SGC" by changing the firmware. Also, It"s been brought to our attention that trying to program the 4D screens using an FTDI breakout can damage the driver. You"ll need to use the FT232RQ USB to Serial which you can find in the related items below.

I am current considering use of this display but have not ordered it yet. I am a little hesitant due to the number of users reporting problems with these displays.

I am in the process of creating a PCB footprint for this display, but when applying the 3D model provided, the hole spacing of the display"s connector pads do not appear to be on a 0.100" grid. Is this an error in the model or are the display"s connector pins on a weird spacing? If so, what is the spacing? Any help would be much appreciated.

I would say use your best judgement. I have only looked at the reviews under the review page and they all seem fine; unfortunately, I don"t have time to comb through all +200 comments. That being said, you can check out our Technical Assistance page linked in the banner above and our returns policy. Another resource for you is the [forum]https://forum.sparkfun.com/], where you can check for what issues users had and if there was a resolution to the issue.

As shown in the hookup guide the through hole header connections should be about a .1" spacing (image of connection into a normal breadboard). I"ve never used Blender and there person who made the models is no longer around to ask... so I can"t speak to the accuracy of that file.

I had a project that needed some live data display, and looking for the cheapest low-power solution for our loggers lead me to the Nokia 5110 LCD. Once you get the backlight current under control, you can power the entire display from a digital pin, and if you use shiftout for soft SPI you can then get rid of the Reset and CS control lines. This brings the display down to any four wires you can spare on your build (incl. the power pin) and a ground line. This is much more manageable than what you see with the standard hookup guides if your mc is I/O limited like our pro-mini based loggers:

This LCD (I have the old-old kind) is absolutely my favorite. Yes, it has a board-to-glass connector that ranges from bad to abysmal, but it offers such a simple interface and so many pixels for so little money (obviously less if you buy only the panel.) Here are some clever things I"ve discovered:

Will fully operate on as little as 2.0V. That"s power (Vdd) and i/o. It can be driven at 2MHz at these speeds; in fact, the LCD will work at even lower voltages but the contrast fades quickly and your microcontroller will likely approach its lower voltage limit too.

The initialization sequence is magic. Here it is, in case you were, like me, frustrated over and over again with varying sequences that others claimed to work but they didn"t for you:

Reset/initialization can be picky - the datasheet says that the delay from power-up to reset mustn"t exceed 30ms. What I found to be the best is to set SCE low and reset high at system bootup, wait 5ms for voltages to stabilize, lower reset, delay by ~1uS (1 nop @ 8MHz will do), raise reset then send it the initialization sequence above.

The LCD will work with the chip-select pin (SCE) tied to ground. This means that if it"s the only device on the SPI bus, don"t bother framing the i/o with a chip-select pin. If the bus is shared, frame the entire transaction, not every individual byte you send to the LCD. Interestingly, the display also seems to work fine with a floating Vdd pin - it must draw sufficient power just from i/o via clamping diodes; not surprising when you consider how low-power it is.

The Vout pin: Looks like you don"t have to worry about it on this product, but the bare LCD will generate positive 6-9V on that pin. This wasn"t totally clear to me from reading the datasheet.

Magic indeed! I"m using a different approach for the RST (pull low as soon as possible, hold low for 100ms, then set high and continue) just as a matter of making sure I get a clean boot, but otherwise I end up using your init sequence verbatim. Saved me a ton of work since I"d been fighting with it for two hours.

(2) The second command byte (the 0xE0 shown above) is not arbitrary. It is 0x80, or"ed together with a 7-bit Vop value. I found my display to be somewhat sensitive to this value. At Vop=0xBF, my unit was initializing electronically, but had a blank display (or solid-black, I can"t remember now.) Anyway, I had to play with this value, and 0xB3 ended up working for me, so if you are initializing to this sequence and having trouble, try varying this parameter. The technical details of this parameter are explained in the datasheet, section 8.9, but really, you will just have to play with it.

(3) I didn"t find reset/init to be all that tricky, but it"s possibly because I"m powering the display unit from a port pin. That"s right, it only draws somewhere around a mA or less, so I just use an output-configured port pin to run the display VDD. (This lets me turn off the display easily when I want to go into low-power Sleep mode on my micro.) So I let my micro do it"s own reset sequence with all my port pins (including Display VDD, !Reset, and !SCE) at "0", and when I"m ready, I set, in sequence:

Note the datasheet says reset can be low when VDD is applied, and then has to be at least a 100ns "low" pulse. So powering up VDD, then applying !SCE at 1 us and !Reset at 2 us meets that spec just fine. I have had perfectly consistent startup operation with this sequence.

(4) !SCE tied to ground - yes, you could, but I"ve had fine results framing each byte with the !SCE signal - there"s nothing wrong with that. Yes, framing a whole transaction is fine, too. Note the datasheet timing diagrams show that !SCE serves a reset function on the incoming serial shift register, so if you ever get a glitch in your serial transmission that gets the bit count off, respecting the !SCE timing (whether on byte- or transaction-basis) will automatically get the display controller"s serial receiver synchronized back up on the next byte or transaction.

(5) If you are using a PIC to run ths thing, and using the PIC"s USART or EUSART in a synchronous mode, be sure to note that the LCD controller expects the MSBit of each byte to be transmitted first on the serial line. The PIC 18F EUSART transmits the LSBit first. For now, I have lots of extra code space, so I"ve wasted a 256-byte section on a lookup table that reverses the bits in a byte. This way, I just write my initialization code normally, and I have a TransmitCommandByte() function that looks up every byte it sends so I don"t have to think about that.

Once I get to a final version (or at whatever point I need to conserve code space) I"ll just establish my final command sequencing, and hard-code in the bit-reversed values so I can get rid of that lookup table.

As a separate issue from the command bytes, all my graphic data are already created with the proper bit orientation, so I don"t have to look them up to do the reversal.

It may be possible to compensate for the low voltage by tweaking the contrast or updating slowly, but in my testing about three years ago journeys beneath 2.0V led to the display whiting slowly out like the face of an inexperienced fighter pilot in an aerobatic manoeuvre.

Thank you! I"m not quite sure I do want an LCD yet, to be honest, I"m just considering the different options available. I"ll check out the Sharp component, thanks!

Advice for others: It took me quite a while to get this working on an ARM Cortex. Since there is no way to read from the LCD, it is very hard to know if SPI is working without doing everything perfectly. SO:

Use the contrast value that Kuy gives (0xE0) or darker - this will cause the display to be all-black so you can confirm it works. THEN you can adjust the value and focus on getting characters to write.

The correct fix is to delete the "\" (backslash) character in the comment for the 0x5C entry. The backslash is the "continue on next line" symbol, so the next line is not seen as part of the initializer, thus making everything following it offset by 1. Just change the "\" character to the word "backslash" and everything will be good:,{0x00, 0x7f, 0x41, 0x41, 0x00} // 5b [

I bought my display from eBay. A dirty cheap bargain from Hong Kong. I must say that it is exactly as the SFE breakout board, but of course, it didn"t work.

The problem I had was solid black display screen. No matter the combination of bias and contrast values that I set. The unit wasn"t totally defective, because under a strong lamp light you could see the display trying to show the letters and pictures that are in the tutorial for Arduino that I got from SFE.

Finally, after a long time of trials, I fixed it--> The problem: the bezel wasn"t tight to the board, so the contacts of the display didn"t work well.

Conclusions: You get what you pay, don"t expect well manufactured products and tested components comming from China at half the price you pay here. And second, it is totally no good idea to start up a new development with new technologies with untrusty material. Maybe you can try some cheap components after you are sure that you are used to certain technology (a display, a sensor, whatever), but don"t try to break the barrier of new knowledge and tricky materials at the same time; because you won"t be able to know who is the faulty.

The problem with these displays, and it seems to be common to all the manufacturers, is that the PCB material is too thin. After a month or two, the board slowly bows away from the glass display panel under pressure from the conductive rubber connector strip. Pressing on the top centre of the metal part of the display makes it work again, but only temporarily.

If the LCD module is soldered to another board and the two top screws installed and tightened carefully to pull the bow out of the module it seems to prevent (or solve) the problem.

The only real fix for this display is to redesign the metal cover with a hold-down tag in the top centre, or make it with a thicker PCB that doesn"t bow under pressure from the connector. Until that happens I won"t be buying any more.

The Arduino code works fine for me, but I can"t make any thing work with Pic. I found this code at http://www.sunbizhosting.com/~spiral/ , but can"t figure out what I"m doing wrong.

I"m using voltage dividers to supply 3V in the inputs of the LCD, because of the Arduino works in 5V. LCD Vcc and LED are powered from the 3.3V output of the Arduino. The LCD only displayed something when I used: R1=470K,R2=820K. I have tried several values to obtain 3V, but the LCD showed nothing. I don"t understand that.

You"ll want to put a command byte of 0x20 in there, after the 0x14, and before the 0x0C. This is needed to put the display back into its "basic" command set, so it will correctly recognize the 0x0C command byte that puts it into "normal" (not inverse) display mode.

I"m interfacing this LCD with ATMEGA 32. Its been more than a week that I"ve been trying to get it right. All I get is the LED dimming effect. Here is my initialization code..CE=1;

Has anyone played around with minimum and maximum SPI clock rates with this display? I know the datasheet says up to 4 Mbit/s, but assuming this display is the only thing on the particular SPI bus, what"s a good minimum clock rate before you might start to notice delay in the display refresh? I mean TVs are 60 Hz - 120Hz.

I have a similar board made by mib-instruments and bought from ebay years ago. It has been my standard spi test tool because it"s so easy to work with. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nokia-5110-LCD-84x84-dot-martix-backlight-PCB-RED-/320684678723 (specs http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k636/mib_instruments/diy/LCDC2A0SPEC.jpg)

I wanted another one so i bought the sparkfun item but it doesn"t quite work: it flickers and blackens occasionally but my graphic never shows up. Is there a bulletproof arduino sketch I could use to test it?

I almost have it working satisfactorily but I find that the bottom 1/5th of the screen does not function correctly. Sometimes it has some random blocks that are black, most of the time it is blank. I am not sure what would cause this. Is it safe to assume it is a defect on this module?

These LCD"s need cleaning. I have an average failure rate of about 15-20% on delivery. The most common problem is that the contrast is too high, and there"s constant flickering / changing of contrast compared to the other 80% of them.

The solution is fairly simple, unclip the LCD from it"s board and clean the pads on the PCB with 99% IPA. Then remove the lcd back plate and contact bar. Sometimes the contact bar is stuck fairly well to the glass, peel off carefully. Clean the contacts on the LCD glass with IPA, if any residue from the contacts is left on, rub it off carefully with IPA / tissue.

Reassemble, making sure you don"t have even the smallest spec of dust on the bar or contacts. The slightest spec will cause the bar to raise slightly, and that and adjacent contacts

I love this little display! I wanted to be able to create images for it but nothing I saw did exactly what I wanted. So I wrote a processing sketch that creates 84x48 squares on the screen and allows you to click to turn them on or off. Also has buttons to invert, move up/down/left/right, and flip horizontally/vertically. Then, it saves the hex data to a text file to copy to your code. You can also load an image (any size, any colors) and it will scale it, convert to b/w, then put it in the rest of the program so that you can alter the pixels or move it. It isn"t perfect for every occasion but I"ve found it useful and I hope others might too. It is heavily commented so it should be easy to figure things out and change them if you want something different. http://thewanderingengineer.com/2014/07/12/nokia-5110-screen-photo-to-bitmap-converter/

I"ve got 3 of these and wired them up as suggested in the hookup guide and downloaded the example code, and the only thing that seems to work is brightening and dimming the LED. I"ve started again from scratch at least twice, tried all 3 units, and verified all the connections match the hookup guide, and I still the ssame result; no graphics, no text, just a border. Any ideas as to what might be wrong?

Never mind, I had no problem running it at 5V directly from the Arduino with the contrast value bumped up to 45 or above. With 10K ohm resistors on the control lines as shown in the sample hookup, I get a blank screen. Also removing the backslash from the sample code got garbage characters, so I left it in.

Anyone taken these things apart yet? You know the flexible rectangular blocky thing that connects the contact pad on the board to the LCD itself? What are these called?

Got mine running last night and found two problems with the code, one of which was the backslash a couple of others have already noted. Second was that the LCDCharacter() writes two blank vertical lines, one before the character and a second after, when only one is needed. Without the extra blank you get at least one additional character on each line. I"ll probably also move the ASCII font table to PROGMEM space to save on RAM and then start to work on some big digits for a clock.

I"m using this LCD for a large Arduino UNO project, but I"m running out of SRAM memory space. I was wondering if I used PROGMEM on the LCD ASCII array if that would help. If so, does anyone know what the right code for this would be? After looking through a lot of PROGMEM examples, I"m not advance enough to really grasp everything that"s going on. Any help you can give would be a great help. Thanks in advance!

I used one of these LCDs with an Arduino to display GPS information. I wrote a few functions that can display large numbers (28 px high) if anyone is interested, this lets me display speed, heading etc. A writeup of my project is here: http://mechinations.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/gps-sailing/

These are great displays. I ran into a problem using them with the nRF24L01+ radio transciever, which requires the use of the SPI bus. If one attaches both the radio and the display MOSI and SCK pins to pins 13 and 11 as instructed in the hookup guide, the SPI traffic of the other device (in this case the nRF24L01+ radio) will prevent the display from functioning. The easy solution is to move the Nokia 5110 MOSI and SCK pins to any other digital pin. This should be made clear in the hookup guide, where it says there is no choice but to use the hardware SPI pins for the display. I found out that is not true at all. I hope his helps others with the same problem. Despite the occasional bad display these carry much more information that the comparably prices 16 x 2 LCD and use fewer pins too boot. What a deal!

I was able to get this work only after using 5v, and lowering the contrast by int from 55 to 45 to remove the "black box" flickering behind the screen drawings. When I power with 3.3v, nothing - just the LED and dimming etc of the screen. I"d love to use 3.3v (and it seems based on responses here) that it should run only on 3.3v. Any ideas anyone?

It should run on 3.3V only, I found it very sensitive to the contrast value. 55 works for me, but 45 makes nothing show up. You might need to play with this value.

I was wondering if anyone had happened to convert this demo file to a library for easy use? I would love to do it myself but unfortunately I am not very good at it.

Hello people, is there anyone that can tell me the height of this display. I mean the displays height 45x45 mm is the size but i wonder the thickness of it. Only the display not the pcb. I couldn"t find this info on the datasheet. Best Regards..

This is a great display for the money, certainly the best bang for the buck of you can live with B&W and lower res graphics. I have a lcd driver for Arduino I will post on http://www.marchdvd.com/5110 so take a look there it draws text aligned on pixels boundaries of 8 and draws lines and has invert video options.

I just started messing around with this LCD using a STM32F103 microcontroller running at 72MHz... it works great. The only problem I had, and I suspect others might have if they are using fast processors, is that you have to deliberately introduce the setup and hold time delays on the DC pin... if you don"t you will get spurious pixels written to the display. I used a delay of 10uS, although the spec says 100nS is fine.

We didn"t design or assemble this, so unfortunately, we have posted all of the files that we have available from the manufacturer above. I can get a request for a 3D model in for you if you would like though!

Hopefully in the next few days it should be up. Our designers who do the 3D models are pretty slammed with the holidays coming up so it may take a few days.

Just a heads up to anyone trying to run the Arduino example. Make sure you plug Vcc into the 3.3V output on the arduino board. I also had to change the line

I been trying to display 8-10 images as an animation. The individual images all work, but when I trey more than 8 images, nothing happens on the screen, and above 2 images, I get errors in the drawing of the images. Is there some kind of buffer or violent reset I can do so that the data doesnt get jumbled up?

Can someone help me edit the code in the arduino example to display readings from a sensor, I"ve looked through all of the links and searched through the Internet but I couldn"t find an example anywhere, it would really help me if someone could tell me how to do this.

Has someone already been able to get this display to work with an Arduino Due? For some reason I cannot get it to work while it does work perfectly on my Mega. Any ideas why it may not work?

Added a driver for this display to the object-oriented arduino platform; Cosa. Please find example code at https://github.com/mikaelpatel/Cosa/blob/master/examples/Drivers/CosaPCD8544/CosaPCD8544.ino and source code at https://github.com/mikaelpatel/Cosa/blob/master/Cosa/IOStream/Driver/PCD8544.hh.

This driver supports iostream output with form feed, new line and backspace. It also supports drawing of icons and histogram bars. See the example code.

I just spent the last couple hours struggling with this LCD because of something very stupid of me. I was using an atmega328p in AVR-GCC and using hardware SPI. Thinking i didn"t need MISO I hooked it to DC. The LCD worked absolutely fine until I tried to set the x and y position in the ram. It started acting weird every time I tried it. Finally I put dc to another pin and BAM NO PROBLEMS. Looking back I feel pretty stupid but hopefully this post will save someone else the same mistake. Other than that great LCD for my projects

I need to know where to drill the mounting holes in a board I"m designing, can someone get more precise measurements of the physical dimensions of this board?

I used the ASCII font given in the example code in one of my projects and ran across a mystifying bug. I was developing code on a PIC12F675 to drive an OLED through its SPI interface. (Yes there are enough pins and memory to do this!) I was using the HI_TECH C compiler and tried several different approaches and never could get the "]" character to display. After pulling what is left of my hair out for 2 days, I realized there was a "\" in the comment for the previous line of the ASCII font definition which caused the compiler to treat the array entry for ] as a comment! Just replace the "// 5c \" comment with "//5c backslash" and everything works! I don"t know if this effect is peculiar to the HI-TECH compiler only.

The Energia folks have an example program for this LCD and the TI Launchpad written using their Arduino style tooling. I"ve updated their example and added the ability to report back the temperature over a UART. It is a very simple hardware setup since both systems are 3.3v. http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2012/08/digital-thermometer-with-ti-lanchpad.html

1) There seems to be a serious issue related to contrast and/or connections between the display and the breakout board. When running "Black on White" text, the background gradually darkens to a black rectangle covering the etire display area but will revert to normal if the centre of the metal surround is squeezed towards the pcb, however, putting a sprig clip on it to keep it comoressed doesn"t seem to cure the problem, but just slows the raste at which it fails - waggle it and it comes good again.

2) I"m really struggling to find unformation on using this display with the Arduino. The example (pcdtest.pde) provided with the Adafruit libraries (Adafruit_PCD8544 and Adafruit_GFX) won"t even compile and the only library I have found that I can make any sense of using is the PCD8544 library from Google (http://code.google.com/p/pcd8544/downloads/detail?name=PCD8544-1.4.zip) and I can"t really uderstand how to do graphics with that.

I did find another example (did"t save it and can"t find it again) that worked with the Adafruit libraries as it was supplied (including graphics), but trying to change it in any way beyond changing the text of the "Hello World !" string (which actually shoed on screen as "Hffmmp Wpsme !", so obviously a coding problem there!!!) just locked everythig up.

I tried using the "LCDAssistant" package to create a logo from a graphic that I resized to a b&w jpg of 84x48 but every byte generated was 0x00 so that was not right. I tried fiddling with the settings (flying blind) but still got nowhere - does anybody know the settings for LCDAssistant and this display and has used it successfully?

Maybe some of the answers are on here somewhere but, frankly, I don"t understand a lot of what is being said - I"m a very old dog, who is struggling badly with new tricks...

Hi - for some reason (way above my "new to s/w" head) the code hates the \ character, even in comments. If you take out the backslash in the character definition section it works. My tweak is:

One of the things that I test regularly is a commercial item that features a 16x4 (HD44780) display. Currently I have a 20x4 on a flying lead that I plug in to determine if a display failure is down the lcd display or the main board.

Is there any way to get the 5110 Graphic Display to work with signals that were feeding to an HD44780? - if I could build that in then I would have a complete multi-testing set up in one box.

I"m very out of date hadrware-wise (I was out of electronics for 30 years) and I"m not a programmerby any stretch of the imagiation (even a relatively simple sketch takes hours eliminating the errors one by one).

I have the other test functions working ok by using the library and cobbling together code from projects I"ve found on the web (very inefficent coding when put together I"m sure, but it works) but I"d dearly love to add this extra functionality.

I am using arduino example and while i am getting proper images and text i also get some odd horizontal flickering. It looks like several horizantal lines across the screen on the background with image/text on foreground. I tried switching to only use digital pins on my arduino leonardo but i still see this behaviour. Any ideas?

Make sure your power is regulated correctly, and that all of your soldering points and connections are good. It may simply be a bad screen. If you still run into problems, shoot us an email at techsupport@sparkfun.com

Is there mechanical documentation for this (location of mounting holes, location of screen relative to board, etc)? Yes, I can measure it but I"m lazy...

I only had a little problem showing lower case chars when using the example code but it seemed to be a problem with the comment "// 5c \". Once the backslash was removed everything was working as expected.

Thats a really good catch. The text editor doesn"t catch it, so I wonder what the issue is. It must be some sort of continue to next line character.I would have spent all night trying to figure it out. Thanks

I see that this item is Out of Stock (back-order allowed). I have a embedded system I have been documenting / publishing the design for over the last month, so I would like to know if Sparkfun Plans on keeping this part and if so for how long? Is there a part you would recommend for replacement if this one is going away?

Might I suggest you (SFE) source some of the Electronic Assembly"s LCD Dog-S series. I think they would be a step up from these at a reduced price. I don"t think that they website is up to date, but their part number is LED39x41-GR.

This is really nice. But it"s in CPP. I use the gcc (win-avr) compiler. Do you have a link to a C library like this? Otherwise I"ll have to try to port this to C. Which would be a real task because I have no experience with CPP.

I just got 2 of these. Haven"t had a chance to hook them up yet. But I gather that the LEDs are green. Has anyone managed to lift up the display and change the LEDs for white or other color?

I made a little font generator for the Nokia 5110 in the processing programming language (processing.org). It allows you to convert any font and any character that you can display on the screen into a list of hex codes that can be directly used in an embedded system (I"m using msp430). Just type a character and the corresponding hex codes will be in your clipboard and you can copy them into your program. It starts with an example with the chinese character for 5. It should work on any system that can run processing (e.g. mac osx).

I am guessing that you are seeing the PCB bent away from the back of the display, up near the "top" of the display region, when it is viewed in normal operation, right?

This is because this is where the connections are on the back of the "display glass". These connections are carried down into the PCB via a small strip of that elastomeric connector material. This material works by being compressed between the two substrates (the glass and the PCB) to hold it in place and make the connections between the pads on each surface. As a result of being compressed, it puts a force "up" on the glass, and "down" onto the PCB. In this particular design, this has the result of bowing the PCB in the units I have purchased.

My thought, if I were up to me, would be to redesign the metal hold-down bracket, to have one more metal tab going down through an additional slot in the PCB, right there at the center of the top edge of the hold-down bracket. This would carry the majority of the reaction to the force exerted by the elastomeric strip, and should minimize board bowing.

I finally got around to running this LCD on my 3310 PCB. It is working fine with one minor problem. The SF 3310 display hides to first line of bytes for some reason and I had to offset everything to compensate. The 5110 doesn"t do this as behaves as expected. I haven"t heard anyone else report this so maybe my initialization code is different.

Using a 3V source, my LCD often worked OK using bias 0x14 like the other examples, but sometimes it would appear gray and faded. The fading would lessen if I touched the panel lightly with my hand for a few seconds, then let go, so maybe it"s a temperature-dependent thing?

After writing a program to let me interactively adjust Vop, temperature coefficient, and bias, and experimenting with different values, I found that bias 0x15 worked much, much better than 0x14. I"m also using Vop 0xD0 and temperature coeff 0x04, but those don"t seem to matter as much.

0x14 is not 1:48 bias. If you read the datasheet on the top of page 16, 0x14 corresponds to a bias of 1:40/1:34. If you want 1:48 bias as the comment says, use 0x13. The 0x15 value I"m using corresponds to 1:24 bias.

Ack! After two days of working nicely with 0x15 bias, I reset the board today, and the LCD appeared way over-dark. I changed the bias back to 0x14 and it looks perfect. What the heck?! I think there must be some temperature-sensing or temperature-dependence going on, so the same init values may produce good-looking results one day but not the next.

If you are having problems with the black pixels in images/warping PCB, use original Nokia 5110, I happened to have one at home and it works as it should, no bad connections degrading image quality.

Does anyone know whether this can be stripped of its backing so it can be used in transmission? I would love to use this as a modulator for a laser beam. Or if someone knows a similarly cheap transmission LCD that would be fine too.

Has anyone created an eagle footprint for this? I"ll be doing so when the order arrives. Basically just the outline with mounting holes and the 8 pin header.

For those of the arduino persuasion, I wrapped some simple methods up in a library based on this arduino page http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/PCD8544.

Stuck. Blank LCD. Added 0x20, changed Vop to 0xB3. Guessing connections may be the issue? 3.3v for LED and VCC. GND to GND. Remainder connected to Arduino via voltage dividers. What am I doing wrong?

This is a great little lcd. When I first wired it up, the backlight was shorted (accidentally) against my 5v rail, so i got some magic smoke, and burnt to LEDs but it re-soldered the offending joints and it works very well now. Something to note: the refresh and write times are much, much slower if you use 5 volt logic. I stuck in a logic level converter and it ran at least 5x faster.

I did the same thing (see my comment above), but I still can"t seem to get anything to display. 3 of the 4 backlight LEDs still light up when I give them power, but I"m wondering what joints you re-soldered to get it to work again.

Also, I"m assuming it"s okay that there"s no diode on my board like there is shown in the product image. I guess other people"s boards are coming like that, too?

You can also use FastLCD to convert your bitmaps - google it. It outputs BASIC code, but you just search and replace &h to 0x and you"re grand. It has the added advantage of being an editor for touching up output.

I found that same 0xB3 value works just right for the two units I have. I wonder if some of the difficulties people have getting them going is from using "E0" or "BF" or some of the other values I"ve seen posted. When I first powered mine up, I got NOTHING on the screen, and I would have thought it was dead, or assumed mine had "bad connections", if I hadn"t known to play with that Vop value...

I recently obtained a virtually identical LCD from a Nokia 5160, and although its backlight LEDs are green, not white and conversely use different voltages, I had success hooking up the LEDs" Vcc pin to a PWM capable pin on the microcontroller, allowing me to control backlight intensity (I didn"t need a current limiting resistor for this either, but adding one will help reduce current drain on the controller).

Seems like the PCD8544 library does it"s own SPI bit managing and it really doesn"t like me using the SD library (also talks SPI) at the same time. I"ve made sure I"ve got all the SPI pins matching for both libraries (MISO, MOSI, Clock are the same and each device has it"s own Select), but it looks like the SD.begin() call just breaks the SPI bus for the 5110 and it becomes non-responsive. The LCD works just fine if I don"t initialize the SD library and the SD card works fine if I do initialize the SD card.

I"m pretty sure I tracked down the problem- the PCD8544 library uses software SPI while the SD library uses hardware SPI and I"m pretty sure the Arduino can"t do both over the same SPI clock/miso/mosi pins. Anyone know if this LCD will work with hardware SPI?

Hi! I"m having the same problem that you explained a lot of time ago, maybe you"ve forgotten it but, what where the changes you made to the PCD8544 library?

I accidentally (well, intentionally, but stupidly) plugged the LED backlight line directly into 5V when I first got this, and I saw (and smelled) the magic black smoke escape. I believe the black smoke only came from one of the backlight LEDs burning out, because I only notice one of them not working now. The other backlight LEDs still light up okay, but I also now seem to be having trouble getting the display to show anything. I"m just wondering if I could have messed anything else up. It seems like others have had their issues with this display, so I was hoping I maybe had something misconfigured. I"m fairly certain I have the pins assigned properly, but maybe I"ll tinker with the contrast. Any recommendations for setting the contrast value?

I"ve had issues with the LCD not showing anything intermittently. You got to make sure that all the connections are secure, and for the reset pulse, be sure to have a delay that"s 30-50 milliseconds long.

As much as I love SFE products and will continue to order from them, this is one product I would not recommend. The connection between the LCD unit itself and the carrier board is via those rubber polymer connectors. All the planets must line up properly for them to work. In this case, the carrier board was warped preventing the connection from working. You will find other such remarks in the comments area.

Out of curiosity - what indication is it giving you that it is powering up, if there is nothing on the display? There are no outputs brought out from the controller, so what feedback are you seeing that leads you to believe it is powering up?

I"ve followed the linked-to Arduino example and I get nothing on the display. Should it just work without any other components? The link mentions a possible cap on VOUT but there"s no such pin. Googling has suggested my Duemilanove"s digital pins will be @5V but I need 3.3V?

I have mine working now! The secret was oz-solutions"s linked-to observation about the second code example which does more initialisation. I suspect that the default contrast etc makes the screen blank.

Don"t do this. Each divider will be burning 20x the entire amount of current that the display needs to function, and the whole assembly will waste 100x the LCD"s needed power and many, many times more than even the atmega needs to run at full speed. This will kill battery life.

Either use higher resistor values, n-mosfets for level conversion (see this Sparkfun BOB for an example), or drive the whole system on 2.0V - 3.3V (don"t know how easy that is with an Arduino.)

I got this little screen for my Netduino but it just won"t work! I"ve tried everything, and even worked on it with someone who had the same screen but it won"t work. We got it all right, but it just won"t work. If anyone here gets it to work with the netduino please let me know.

Hi, I just bought this wonderful LCD but I"m having huge huge problems connecting it..could anyone please point me in the right direction? Since there are pins that aren"t metioned in the code, for example the 6 - DNK(MOSI)...

I have been running this at 5V with no problems, I have not been using the back light. Love this thing, need a few more. @ 5v mine pulls about 1ma. Not to bad.This + openlog + atmega328 @8 mhz = 10-12ma max this is so cool.

It looks like the board just has 4 white LEDs in parallel and no current limiting resistors. To drive them safely from 5V you should probably use something along the lines of at least a 22 Ohm resistor which should limit the current to 80mA (20mA per LED).

Does anyone know the diode rating and package size, also does anyone know where to get the rubber ferroius connector behind the LCD mine is defective. Has anyone come into issues with the breadboard the LCD is connected to, a few aren"t working for me.

Yes, we have noticed that the PCB was bowing and as a result the LCD now only works when we press down on the metal strip at the top. I hope that only a small number of these LCDs have this problem. We"re expecting a shipment to arrive today, I will be running more tests.

I got two of these defective boards. I tested one with every mechanical thing I could think of to fix it, even soldered a paper clip as a spring to hold pressure from the back side. Nothing worked permanently. I ended up cracking the glass trying just to get the thing to work! I cracked it more out of frustration.

My second one had the exact same problem. I took the glass off and have applied superglue to the back of the glass and am clamping it (more gently this time) overnight to try to just get my $20 worth (at this point) out of the last one I have.

Edit: After leaving glue to dry overnight, LCD simply does not turn on anymore. All the connections are good, but absolutely nothing shows on the LCD now at all. Only the LEDs come on.

Did you get either of the LCDs to display anything, at any time? Is it possible that the connections were OK, but you were not initializing or driving them correctly? Or did they start to work at one point, and then fail at some later point?

When I originally tried to get mine working, I was seeing NOTHING on the display. Then I had to get my initialization sequence correct, and adjusted my Vop value (ultimately using a byte of 0xB3) before the screen would display anything visible at all.

Note that the backlight LED"s are soldered onto the breakout board, and have nothing to do with the circuitry of the controller and LCD. So just because the backlights are shining doesn"t tell you anything about the operability of the LCD itself.

I have two display boards that both work, but I do see the bowing along the "top" edge of the metal bracket. I haven"t taken one apart yet, but I assume this is the edge nearest the elastomeric strip, which is creating this bowing force.

I wish the designer(s) had put one more hold down tab on the metal bracket (like the pair on each side, which go down through the PCB slots) along this top edge, to minimize the board bowing. There are traces running through there, but it shouldn"t have been hard to route a couple of signals around such a slot...

It depends on the code that you are using to control the LCD. If you are using the Arduino example above, the pins are defined in the beginning of the code.

FWIW I have connected this LCD with a 5V power supply to a 5V Arduino board with no level conversion and it worked. Presumably this may reduce the lifetime of the LCD.

According to the Datasheet this is operating within the "Limiting Values" listed on page 17 of the driver IC. "Stresses above those listed under limiting values may cause permanent damage to the device."

I am attempting to use this with a Duemilanove (ATmega328). Up til now, I have been powering it with the 3.3V line, including the LED. The datasheet for the LDC claims: "VDDmax = 5 V if LCD supply voltage is internally generated (voltage generator enabled)." The logic levels should be kept from 2.7V to 3.3V. Since the Duemilanove uses 5V logic levels, I am using a simple voltage divider on the communication line with no issues.

Now, when I attempted to use the board on 5V, some of the magic smoke escaped. It may be just the LEDs, since now one doesn"t work and another is very dim.

It would be nice to have a real spec on the LEDs, though. After looking at BlackJester"s graph I went ahead and wired the LEDs to 3.3 with no current limiting resistor and all seems fine -- but I don"t really know if I"m limiting the life of the parts....

It says under the absolute maximum ratings section of that datasheet that VddMAX=5V (internally generated voltage) and VinMAX= Vdd+0.5. So I would think that 5V logic is ok as long as the power supply is at 5V also.

The Absolute Maximums section of a datasheet (also known as Limiting Values as in the Philips datasheet here) is only used to specify conditions that might cause permanent damage to a device, and should not be used to infer normal operating parameters.

Normal operating parameters are found in the DC Characteristics and AC Characteristics tables. Note that in DC Characteristics, the VDD2 is listed as min 2.7V and max 3.3V. This is the manufacturer"s specification for how to run the device to its specified performance.

If you run outside this range, performance is not specified, and you"re on your own. (Maybe it won"t work at all, will work inconsistently, or maybe it will work but other specs will be off - it may draw more current, timing may be off, etc...)

The maximum logic value of 3.3 volts made me cautious of driving the LCDs at the native 5 volts of my Teensy AVR. That said, running purely off 5 volts seems to do no harm to the LCD.

For those interested, I have taken a few measurements of the current draw of the LED backlight of my LCD. As I said earlier, powering the LED with 5V external has caused permanent damage to one, perhaps two of the four LEDs. So, use the following graph at your own risk.

People have been asking what resistor to use with 3.3v. I"ve been using a 220Ohm resister to limit the current with a 3.3v supply. The voltage drop on the resistor is a little over 0.5v and the current is 2-3mA which is about right for your graph. I think this is safe for not burning the LEDs. It provides plenty of light when you need it and doesn"t drain the batteries too much.

I think your math is a little off. a 0.5 V drop across 2200 ohms is about 0.25 mA not 2 mA. This is also what I measured using a 2K resistor in series with an ammeter. Just FYI.

I made some changes/additions to the example code linked above. The main addition is a function that makes it easy to turn individual pixels on/off.

Is there any more documentation available for the additions to the LCD? For example, the datasheet has no information (that I could find, at least) on the LED. Everything seems fine on 3.3V, but what is the current limit on the LED? (note: if it wasn"t for work, I would just mess around with it myself.)

If you want to wire up several up these to a single microcontroller, you might take advantage of my freshly GPL"d C++ driver library for PCD8544 devices. It"s templated, so you can avoid duplicating code all over the place. Here"s a picture of two PCD8544 screens running off of an ATmega328. (The screens are operating independently, even though they happen to be showing the same logo graphic in that picture.)

Here is a PicBasic Pro example for the 3310, which should be compatible with the 5110. http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/content.php?r=174-Using-Nokia-3310-LCD

Fantastic! It appears from your example link that this uses the same controller as the Nokia 3310 that I"ve already used in past projects. The only thing that made it so cumbersome was trying to connect to its fine pitch press on type connector. This gives me a great low cost display option that is easy to connect to.

If anyone doesn"t have experience with this LCD, take a peak at the Arduino example link above to see just how easy it is to use. If you use plain C on your AVRs, I have sample code on http://tinkerish.com.

Our new line of 10.1” TFT displays with IPS technology are now available! These 10.1” IPS displays offer three interface options to choose from including RGB, LVDS, and HDMI interface, each with two touchscreen options as capacitive or without a touchscreen.

The new line of 3.5” TFT displays with IPS technology is now available! Three touchscreen options are available: capacitive, resistive, or without a touchscreen.

Please take care of the direction when you connect Pico, a USB port is printed to indicate. You can also check the pin of Pico and the LCD board when connecting.

This guide is based on Raspberry Pi. However, due to the multi-platform and portable features of CMake, it can also be successfully compiled on a PC, but the operation is slightly different, and you need to judge by yourself.

Open main.c under the c folder, you can change the demo you need. This demo can drive the display of our company"s Pico series and the source code will be updated all the time. Please select the corresponding LCD or OLED test function and comment out the irrelevant functions.

After the compilation is complete, the uf2 file will be generated. Press and hold the button on the Pico board, connect the pico to the USB port of the Raspberry Pi through the Micro USB cable, and release the button. After connecting, the Raspberry Pi will automatically recognize a removable disk (RPI-RP2) and copy the main.uf2 file in the build folder to the recognized removable disk (RPI-RP2).

1. Press and hold the BOOTSET button on the Pico board, connect the pico to the USB port of the computer through the Micro USB cable, and release the button after the computer recognizes a removable hard disk (RPI-RP2).

1. The process of flashing the firmware is the same as that on Windows, you can choose to copy the pico_micropython_20210121.uf2 file into pico on the PC or Raspberry Pi.

2. Open Thonny IDE on the Raspberry Pi (click the Raspberry logo -> Programming -> Thonny Python IDE), you can check the version information in Help->About Thonny.

To ensure that your version has a Pico support package, you can also click Tools -> Options... -> Interpreter to select MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico and ttyACM0 port.

Draw circle: Draw a circle in the image buffer, use (X_Center Y_Center) as center and Radius as radius. You can configure the color, width of the line, and style of the circle.

Draw number: In the image buffer, at (Xstart Ystart) as the left vertex, write a string of numbers, you can choose the Ascii font, font foreground color, font background color.

Glass substrate with ITO electrodes. The shapes of these electrodes will determine the shapes that will appear when the LCD is switched ON. Vertical ridges etched on the surface are smooth.

A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directlybacklight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome.seven-segment displays, as in a digital clock, are all good examples of devices with these displays. They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made from a matrix of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements. LCDs can either be normally on (positive) or off (negative), depending on the polarizer arrangement. For example, a character positive LCD with a backlight will have black lettering on a background that is the color of the backlight, and a character negative LCD will have a black background with the letters being of the same color as the backlight. Optical filters are added to white on blue LCDs to give them their characteristic appearance.

LCDs are used in a wide range of applications, including LCD televisions, computer monitors, instrument panels, aircraft cockpit displays, and indoor and outdoor signage. Small LCD screens are common in LCD projectors and portable consumer devices such as digital cameras, watches, calculators, and mobile telephones, including smartphones. LCD screens have replaced heavy, bulky and less energy-efficient cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays in nearly all applications. The phosphors used in CRTs make them vulnerable to image burn-in when a static image is displayed on a screen for a long time, e.g., the table frame for an airline flight schedule on an indoor sign. LCDs do not have this weakness, but are still susceptible to image persistence.

Each pixel of an LCD typically consists of a layer of molecules aligned between two transparent electrodes, often made of Indium-Tin oxide (ITO) and two polarizing filters (parallel and perpendicular polarizers), the axes of transmission of which are (in most of the cases) perpendicular to each other. Without the liquid crystal between the polarizing filters, light passing through the first filter would be blocked by the second (crossed) polarizer. Before an electric field is applied, the orientation of the liquid-crystal molecules is determined by the alignment at the surfaces of electrodes. In a twisted nematic (TN) device, the surface alignment directions at the two electrodes are perpendicular to each other, and so the molecules arrange themselves in a helical structure, or twist. This induces the rotation of the polarization of the incident light, and the device appears gray. If the applied voltage is large enough, the liquid crystal molecules in the center of the layer are almost completely untwisted and the polarization of the incident light is not rotated as it passes through the liquid crystal layer. This light will then be mainly polarized perpendicular to the second filter, and thus be blocked and the pixel will appear black. By controlling the voltage applied across the liquid crystal layer in each pixel, light can be allowed to pass through in varying amounts thus constituting different levels of gray.

The chemical formula of the liquid crystals used in LCDs may vary. Formulas may be patented.Sharp Corporation. The patent that covered that specific mixture expired.

Most color LCD systems use the same technique, with color filters used to generate red, green, and blue subpixels. The LCD color filters are made with a photolithography process on large glass sheets that are later glued with other glass sheets containing a TFT array, spacers and liquid crystal, creating several color LCDs that are then cut from one another and laminated with polarizer sheets. Red, green, blue and black photoresists (resists) are used. All resists contain a finely ground powdered pigment, with particles being just 40 nanometers across. The black resist is the first to be applied; this will create a black grid (known in the industry as a black matrix) that will separate red, green and blue subpixels from one another, increasing contrast ratios and preventing light from leaking from one subpixel onto other surrounding subpixels.Super-twisted nematic LCD, where the variable twist between tighter-spaced plates causes a varying double refraction birefringence, thus changing the hue.

LCD in a Texas Instruments calculator with top polarizer removed from device and placed on top, such that the top and bottom polarizers are perpendicular. As a result, the colors are inverted.

The optical effect of a TN device in the voltage-on state is far less dependent on variations in the device thickness than that in the voltage-off state. Because of this, TN displays with low information content and no backlighting are usually operated between crossed polarizers such that they appear bright with no voltage (the eye is much more sensitive to variations in the dark state than the bright state). As most of 2010-era LCDs are used in television sets, monitors and smartphones, they have high-resolution matrix arrays of pixels to display arbitrary images using backlighting with a dark background. When no image is displayed, different arrangements are used. For this purpose, TN LCDs are operated between parallel polarizers, whereas IPS LCDs feature crossed polarizers. In many applications IPS LCDs have replaced TN LCDs, particularly in smartphones. Both the liquid crystal material and the alignment layer material contain ionic compounds. If an electric field of one particular polarity is applied for a long period of time, this ionic material is attracted to the surfaces and degrades the device performance. This is avoided either by applying an alternating current or by reversing the polarity of the electric field as the device is addressed (the response of the liquid crystal layer is identical, regardless of the polarity of the applied field).

Displays for a small number of individual digits or fixed symbols (as in digital watches and pocket calculators) can be implemented with independent electrodes for each segment.alphanumeric or variable graphics displays are usually implemented with pixels arranged as a matrix consisting of electrically connected rows on one side of the LC layer and columns on the other side, which makes it possible to address each pixel at the intersections. The general method of matrix addressing consists of sequentially addressing one side of the matrix, for example by selecting the rows one-by-one and applying the picture information on the other side at the columns row-by-row. For details on the various matrix addressing schemes see passive-matrix and active-matrix addressed LCDs.

LCDs are manufactured in cleanrooms borrowing techniques from semiconductor manufacturing and using large sheets of glass whose size has increased over time. Several displays are manufactured at the same time, and then cut from the sheet of glass, also known as the mother glass or LCD glass substrate. The increase in size allows more displays or larger displays to be made, just like with increasing wafer sizes in semiconductor manufacturing. The glass sizes are as follows:

Until Gen 8, manufacturers would not agree on a single mother glass size and as a result, different manufacturers would use slightly different glass sizes for the same generation. Some manufacturers have adopted Gen 8.6 mother glass sheets which are only slightly larger than Gen 8.5, allowing for more 50 and 58 inch LCDs to be made per mother glass, specially 58 inch LCDs, in which case 6 can be produced on a Gen 8.6 mother glass vs only 3 on a Gen 8.5 mother glass, significantly reducing waste.AGC Inc., Corning Inc., and Nippon Electric Glass.

The origins and the complex history of liquid-crystal displays from the perspective of an insider during the early days were described by Joseph A. Castellano in Liquid Gold: The Story of Liquid Crystal Displays and the Creation of an Industry.IEEE History Center.Peter J. Wild, can be found at the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

In 1888,Friedrich Reinitzer (1858–1927) discovered the liquid crystalline nature of cholesterol extracted from carrots (that is, two melting points and generation of colors) and published his findings at a meeting of the Vienna Chemical Society on May 3, 1888 (F. Reinitzer: Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Cholesterins, Monatshefte für Chemie (Wien) 9, 421–441 (1888)).Otto Lehmann published his work "Flüssige Kristalle" (Liquid Crystals). In 1911, Charles Mauguin first experimented with liquid crystals confined between plates in thin layers.

In 1922, Georges Friedel described the structure and properties of liquid crystals and classified them in three types (nematics, smectics and cholesterics). In 1927, Vsevolod Frederiks devised the electrically switched light valve, called the Fréedericksz transition, the essential effect of all LCD technology. In 1936, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph company patented the first practical application of the technology, "The Liquid Crystal Light Valve". In 1962, the first major English language publication Molecular Structure and Properties of Liquid Crystals was published by Dr. George W. Gray.RCA found that liquid crystals had some interesting electro-optic characteristics and he realized an electro-optical effect by generating stripe-patterns in a thin layer of liquid crystal material by the application of a voltage. This effect is based on an electro-hydrodynamic instability forming what are now called "Williams domains" inside the liquid crystal.

In 1964, George H. Heilmeier, then working at the RCA laboratories on the effect discovered by Williams achieved the switching of colors by field-induced realignment of dichroic dyes in a homeotropically oriented liquid crystal. Practical problems with this new electro-optical effect made Heilmeier continue to work on scattering effects in liquid crystals and finally the achievement of the first operational liquid-crystal display based on what he called the George H. Heilmeier was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of FameIEEE Milestone.

In the late 1960s, pioneering work on liquid crystals was undertaken by the UK"s Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, England. The team at RRE supported ongoing work by George William Gray and his team at the University of Hull who ultimately discovered the cyanobiphenyl liquid crystals, which had correct stability and temperature properties for application in LCDs.

The idea of a TFT-based liquid-crystal display (LCD) was conceived by Bernard Lechner of RCA Laboratories in 1968.dynamic scattering mode (DSM) LCD that used standard discrete MOSFETs.

On December 4, 1970, the twisted nematic field effect (TN) in liquid crystals was filed for patent by Hoffmann-LaRoche in Switzerland, (Swiss patent No. 532 261) with Wolfgang Helfrich and Martin Schadt (then working for the Central Research Laboratories) listed as inventors.Brown, Boveri & Cie, its joint venture partner at that time, which produced TN displays for wristwatches and other applications during the 1970s for the international markets including the Japanese electronics industry, which soon produced the first digital quartz wristwatches with TN-LCDs and numerous other products. James Fergason, while working with Sardari Arora and Alfred Saupe at Kent State University Liquid Crystal Institute, filed an identical patent in the United States on April 22, 1971.ILIXCO (now LXD Incorporated), produced LCDs based on the TN-effect, which soon superseded the poor-quality DSM types due to improvements of lower operating voltages and lower power consumption. Tetsuro Hama and Izuhiko Nishimura of Seiko received a US patent dated February 1971, for an electronic wristwatch incorporating a TN-LCD.

In 1972, the concept of the active-matrix thin-film transistor (TFT) liquid-crystal display panel was prototyped in the United States by T. Peter Brody"s team at Westinghouse, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Westinghouse Research Laboratories demonstrated the first thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD).high-resolution and high-quality electronic visual display devices use TFT-based active matrix displays.active-matrix liquid-crystal display (AM LCD) in 1974, and then Brody coined the term "active matrix" in 1975.

In 1972 North American Rockwell Microelectronics Corp introduced the use of DSM LCDs for calculators for