esp8266 lcd screen made in china
Check the number in the table, this is your address. If there are more devices on your I2c bus, there will be several addresses visible. To be sure, unplug all other devices and the address left will be the LCD (or try them all)
Which gives a real brainkick when you realize you have SD card, touch screen, free serial port and you could easily add GSM module (without additional memory requirements) and possibly some additional I2C device(s) attached.
Even though it might not be visible at first sight, there’s a tremendous amount of work behind this thing (and by ‘thing’ is meant a combination of software and hardware). When you start installing the sample Weather Station sketch, it appears that you need to install some libraries, all of them by Daniel Eichhorn: ESP8266 WeatherStation which is a WeatherUnderground client, Json Streaming Parser that helps keeping low memory profile while getting huge API responses, and Mini Grafx library that implements a VSYNC equivalent through framebuffer for embedded devices.
The Arduino sketch has 438k built so there’s still plenty of room to add more features. However, I’m looking to dive deeply into existing example code in order to reuse as much as possible. There’s NNTP, visual WiFi display, display carousel, icons, fonts, colours and last but not least the touch screen support.
LCD Displays are a fast and inexpensive way to display simple information. This tutorial will demonstrate how to connect a 16x2 LCD display using I2C to an ESP8266 NodeMCU dev kit.
The LCD display I"m going to use is fairly common and can be picked up for a couple of bucks from Amazon. It uses I2C to communicate with the NodeMCU. I2C is nice because it only required two wires for communication.
Connect the VCC pin on the LCD display to the VIN pin on the NodeMCU. The VIN pin on the NodeMCU is tied directly to the 5V pin on the incoming USB port. If you plan on powering the NodeMCU with something other than USB, you"ll have to find another way to provide 5V to the display.
The LCD display works by first moving the cursor to where you want to start and then printing some characters. In my example, I wanted HELLO and WORLD to be centered on each line. For "HELLO", the cursor needed to be 5 characters from the right and zero characters down, so I moved it (5, 0). For "WORLD", I needed it to be 5 characters to the right and one character down, so I moved it (5, 1).
What I understood was - ignoring the SD card module, they are using an LED driver IC to control the backlight, and a voltage regulator(with some auto reset IC) to feed the correct voltage to the LCD. Apart from that there"s some bypass caps on VCC and, some diodes on the LED driver IC.
Note that we will be using the hardware SPI module of the ESP8266 to drive the TFT LCD. The SPI communication pins are multiplexed with I/O pins D5 (SCK), D6 (MISO), and D7 (MOSI). The chip select (CS) and Data/Command (DC) signal lines are configurable through software.
The library contains proportional fonts, different sizes can be enabled/disabled at compile time to optimise the use of FLASH memory. The library has been tested with the NodeMCU (ESP8266 based).
The library is based on the Adafruit GFX and Adafruit ILI9341 libraries and the aim is to retain compatibility. Significant additions have been made to the library to boost the speed for ESP8266 processors (it is typically 3 to 10 times faster) and to add new features. The new graphics functions include different size proportional fonts and formatting features. There are a significant number of example sketches to demonstrate the different features.
My favorite example is TFT terminal, which implements a simple “Arduino IDE Serial Monitor” like serial receive terminal for monitoring debugging messages from another Arduino or ESP8266 board.
LCD, or Liquid Crystal Displays, are great choices for many applications. They aren’t that power-hungry, they are available in monochrome or full-color models, and they are available in all shapes and sizes.
Waveshare actually has several round LCD modules, I chose the 1.28-inch model as it was readily available on Amazon. You could probably perform the same experiments using a different module, although you may require a different driver.
Open the Arduino folder. Inside you’ll find quite a few folders, one for each display size that Waveshare supports. As I’m using the 1.28-inch model, I selected theLCD_1inch28folder.
Once you do that, you can open your Arduino IDE and then navigate to that folder. Inside the folder, there is a sketch file namedLCD_1inch28.inowhich you will want to open.
Unfortunately, Waveshare doesn’t offer documentation for this, but you can gather quite a bit of information by reading theLCD_Driver.cppfile, where the functions are somewhat documented.
The GC9A01 LCD module is a 1.28-inch round display that is useful for instrumentation and other similar projects. Today we will learn how to use this display with an Arduino Uno and an ESP32.