sunfounder lcd display free sample

As we all know, though LCD and some other displays greatly enrich the man-machine interaction, they share a common weakness. When they are connected to a controller, multiple IOs will be occupied of the controller which has no so many outer ports. Also it restricts other functions of the controller. Therefore, LCD1602 with an I2C bus is developed to solve the problem.

I2C bus is a type of serial bus invented by PHLIPS. It is a high performance serial bus which has bus ruling and high or low speed device synchronization function required by multiple-host system. The blue potentiometer on the I2C LCD1602 (see the figure below) is used to adjust the backlight for better display. I²C uses only two bidirectional open-drain lines, Serial Data Line (SDA) and Serial Clock Line (SCL), pulled up with resistors. Typical voltages used are +5 V or +3.3 V although systems with other voltages are permitted.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As we all know, though LCD and some other displays greatly enrich the man-machine interaction, they share a common weakness. When they are connected to a controller, multiple IOs will be occupied of the controller which has no so many outer ports. Also it restricts other functions of the controller. Therefore, LCD1602 with an I2C bus is developed to solve the problem.

I2C bus is a type of serial bus invented by PHLIPS. It is a high performance serial bus which has bus ruling and high or low speed device synchronization function required by multiple-host system. The blue potentiometer on the I2C LCD1602 (see the figure below) is used to adjust the backlight for better display. I²C uses only two bidirectional open-drain lines, Serial Data Line (SDA) and Serial Clock Line (SCL), pulled up with resistors. Typical voltages used are +5 V or +3.3 V although systems with other voltages are permitted.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As soon as your order is packed and shipped, you"ll receive a shipping confirmation email. You will then be able to track your order through the tracking link on the email. If you haven"t received an email yet, please reach out to us atservice@sunfounder.com, our sales staff will contact you ASAP.

If Customs Duty is payable to your territory, you"ll be responsible for paying it to the authorities, so SunFounder isn"t involved in this process. Whether Customs Duty is payable, and by how much, depends on a whole lot of different things. For example, many countries have a "low value threshold" below which they do not charge any Customs Duty.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

In this lesson, you will learn about LCD1602. LCD1602, or 1602 character-type liquid crystal display, a kind of dot matrix module to show letters, numbers, characters and so on.

It’s composed of 5×7 or 5×11 dot matrix positions; each position can display one character. There’s a dot pitch between two characters and a space between lines, thus separating characters and lines. The number 1602 means on the display, 2 rows can be showed and 16 characters in each.

As we all know, though LCD and some other displays greatly enrich the man-machine interaction, they share a common weakness. When they are connected to a controller, multiple IOs will be occupied of the controller which has no so many outer ports. Also it restricts other functions of the controller. Therefore, LCD1602 with an I2C bus is developed to solve the problem.

In this example, we will get the first pin GND of LCD1602 connected to GND, the second pin VCC to 5V, the third pin SDA to the pin SDA 20 and the forth pin SCL to the pin SCL 21.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As soon as your order is packed and shipped, you"ll receive a shipping confirmation email. You will then be able to track your order through the tracking link on the email. If you haven"t received an email yet, please reach out to us atservice@sunfounder.com, our sales staff will contact you ASAP.

If Customs Duty is payable to your territory, you"ll be responsible for paying it to the authorities, so SunFounder isn"t involved in this process. Whether Customs Duty is payable, and by how much, depends on a whole lot of different things. For example, many countries have a "low value threshold" below which they do not charge any Customs Duty.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

In this experiment, the SunFounder Uno board is used to directly drive LCD1602 to display characters. Before the experiment, you need to solder the pin headers we provided onto the LCD1602 for convenience.

Generally speaking, LCD1602 has parallel ports, that is, it needs to control several pins at the same time. LCD1602 can be categorized into eight-port and four-port connection. If the eight-port connection is used, then the digital ports of the SunFounder Uno board are basically completely occupied. If you want to connect more sensors, there will be no ports available. Therefore, the four-port connection is used.

RS: A register select pin that controls where in the LCD’s memory you are writing data to. You can select either the data register, which holds what goes on the screen, or an instruction register, which is where the LCD’s controller looks for instructions on what to do next.

In this experiment, a 50KΩ potentiometer is used to adjust the contrast of LCD1602 to display characters or figures you want. For programming, it is optimized by calling function libraries.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As soon as your order is packed and shipped, you"ll receive a shipping confirmation email. You will then be able to track your order through the tracking link on the email. If you haven"t received an email yet, please reach out to us atservice@sunfounder.com, our sales staff will contact you ASAP.

If Customs Duty is payable to your territory, you"ll be responsible for paying it to the authorities, so SunFounder isn"t involved in this process. Whether Customs Duty is payable, and by how much, depends on a whole lot of different things. For example, many countries have a "low value threshold" below which they do not charge any Customs Duty.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As soon as your order is packed and shipped, you"ll receive a shipping confirmation email. You will then be able to track your order through the tracking link on the email. If you haven"t received an email yet, please reach out to us atservice@sunfounder.com, our sales staff will contact you ASAP.

If Customs Duty is payable to your territory, you"ll be responsible for paying it to the authorities, so SunFounder isn"t involved in this process. Whether Customs Duty is payable, and by how much, depends on a whole lot of different things. For example, many countries have a "low value threshold" below which they do not charge any Customs Duty.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

As soon as your order is packed and shipped, you"ll receive a shipping confirmation email. You will then be able to track your order through the tracking link on the email. If you haven"t received an email yet, please reach out to us atservice@sunfounder.com, our sales staff will contact you ASAP.

If Customs Duty is payable to your territory, you"ll be responsible for paying it to the authorities, so SunFounder isn"t involved in this process. Whether Customs Duty is payable, and by how much, depends on a whole lot of different things. For example, many countries have a "low value threshold" below which they do not charge any Customs Duty.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

LCD1602, or 1602 character-type liquid crystal display, is a kind of dot matrix module to show letters, numbers, and characters and so on. It"s composed of 5x7 or 5x11 dot matrix positions; each position can display one character. There"s a dot pitch between two characters and a space between lines, thus separating characters and lines. The model 1602 means it displays 2 lines of 16 characters.

Generally, LCD1602 has parallel ports, that is, it would control several pins at the same time. LCD1602 can be categorized into eight-port and four-port connections. If the eight-port connection is used, then all the digital ports of the SunFounder Uno board are almost completely occupied. If you want to connect more sensors, there will be no ports available. Therefore, the four-port connection is used here for better application.

Note: After you run the code, characters may not appear on the LCD1602. You need to adjust the contrast of the screen (the gradual change from black to white) by spinning the potentiometer clockwise or anticlockwise, until the screen displays characters clearly.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

I think the SunFounder 7-inch screen is a good solution to see or control something optimized for a small screen. For example, Volumio as a remote control, maybe a calendar or dashboard (like for home automation), a photo frame or webcam monitor, etc.

For a 7″ inch size with the touchscreen feature, the model from SunFounder I just reviewed is probably one of the best. The issues I found are not so annoying, and you’ll really like it.

If you want to try another one to fix the few cons I see, I would recommend tryingthe SunFounder 10″ version, that should be a bit more comfortable (I also tested a 10″ touchscreen from another brand here).

In summary, the SunFounder 7 inch touchscreen for Raspberry Pi is not perfect, but it’s an excellent one, that you can use as a control monitor for many applications.

sunfounder lcd display free sample

TheRaspad 3.0is a portable tablet enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 4B. It comes with a high resolution 1280 x 800 10.1 inch touch LCD screen, built in speakers, built in battery and a plastic enclosure that houses the LCD driver board and Raspberry Pi. Accessible on the side of the enclosure are the USB, HDMI, ethernet and audio ports which connect via the LCD driver board. They also include an accelerometer shim which allows the screen to autorotate.

A few months ago SunFounder, the company behind the RasPad 3.0 reached out to us and asked if we wanted to review the product with a free sample. Normally we don"t review products unrelated to SDR like this, but given the amount of RTL-SDR software available for the Raspberry Pi, and what appeared to be sufficient internal space, we were curious if there was a way to turn this into a portable RTL-SDR tablet...

Inside was a mains power cable, 15V DC power brick, two HDMI jumpers, a USB jumper, accelerometer shim, SD card ribbon, small 5V fan, heatsinks for the Pi, screwdriver and mounting screws, a manual and the RasPad LCD screen itself.

Assembly is straight forward. You unscrew the enclosure using the provided screw driver, insert the Pi 4B, screw it down, connect all the cables from the Pi to the LCD driver board and SD card slot, then reassemble. After inserting the Raspberry Pi 4B and attaching all the cables this is what the inside looks like.

It turns out that the best way to fit in an RTL-SDR Blog V3 is to directly connect it to the spare USB port on the Pi. You might also consider using a micro style RTL-SDR which would fit more easily, but those do tend to get quite hot in a small package, and can be quite bad with internal noise. Also good shielding is probably quite critical in this application due to the dongles proximity with the LCD driver board which could be an RFI source.

The SMA side of the RTL-SDR Blog V3 rests nicely on top of the USB port of the LCD driver board providing some stability, and when the bottom lid is assembled there is plenty of clearance and no squashing.

SunFounder provide a custom Raspbian distribution designed specially for the RasPad. However, we decided to instead install theDragonOS Pi64 Distrowhich is an Ubuntu distribution for the Raspberry Pi 4B that has many built in SDR programs. We burnt the image to a SD card, inserted it on the side, plugged the Raspad in to the power connector, and held the power button down for a few seconds to turn it on. Despite a few initial error messages saying it cannot enable the USB ports, everything eventually booted just fine.

We then plugged in a cable going to one of our multipurpose dipole antennas mounted just outside the office window, and tested both SDR++ and GQRX. In both cases we were immediately able to connect to the RTL-SDR and receive signals with signal strength equivalent to that received by our desktop PC, indicating that LCD interference was not a problem.

LCD screens are well known to be sources of RF interference, and putting an SDR in close proximity to one could result in the spectrum being very noisy. However, without an antenna connected we did not notice any interference across the spectrum from the LCD screen. It appears that the LCD RFI noise levels are not too bad, and the shielding on the RTL-SDR Blog V3 and the coax jumper cable is good enough to prevent any being received. When an antenna with a few meters of coax was connected (such as a magwhip or our portable dipole) we also didn"t notice any LCD interference.

However, when a SMA telescopic antenna was connected directly to the SMA port we did start noticing the telltale spikes across the spectrum that are typically generated from LCD screens. If the magwhip or dipole was also moved within 2-3cm of the LCD screen, we also saw these interference spikes appear.

The power brick output is 15V, 2A. Ideally we would be able to charge the RasPad via a car/boat 12V connection as well. We"re awaiting a response to see if this is possible. Update: Unfortunately 12V seems to be a no-go, quoting SunFounder "the 12v supply may cause the Raspad to fail to charge, as the minimum is 15v".

There are also alternative LCD screen products designed for the Raspberry Pi where you sit the Raspberry Pi on the back of the screen. But it"s unclear if there would be enough space inside to fit an RTL-SDR, and not to mention the lack of a battery. We alsopreviously reviewedthe Elecrow CrowPi which is somewhat similar, but a lot more clunky if you"re just after a pick up and go portable SDR tablet solution. There are also higher end higher priced laptop style enclosure products for the Pi, like the Pi-Top but we"re unsure if they"re likely to fit the RTL-SDR internally this easily.