esp8266 lcd screen manufacturer

For an upcoming new project I wanted a colour (UK spelling) LCD screen (ideally OLED), 256×256 (or greater) resolution and nice and cheap. It was not an easy 2 minute task. There were no OLED screens offering what I wanted (that I could see at the time). So compromises were made, in the end I purchased a 128×128 pixel screen (none OLED) for around $3.50 (£3.20, 3.50 Euro). Not as cheap as I thought I might get one for but the cheapest I could find. There were a lot of sellers offering this screen and it’s shown below.

As can be seen from the connections it accepts both 5V and 3.3V with the 5V side having a pre-soldered pin header. This particular one was ordered from Ali-Express and had a picture of a cartoon boy on the screen. I suspect buying any with the same pin connections will give you the same screen as the one above.

For my new project (after the Space Invaders one, see https://www.xtronical.com/programming-series-space-invaders-on-arduino/), I wanted a screen where I could directly port the Arcade graphics and screen layout without too much messing about re-designing graphics. But for the price point I wanted this proved impossible. Most arcade games of the early 80’s did not go above 256 pixels in any give direction so porting the graphics should be easy I thought. At half the resolution I hope that transferring the graphics will not be too tedious and that in most cases I can simply reduce the number of pixels in each image by half.

Due to the planned game being more advanced than Space Invaders I needed a processor with more memory and speed than the Arduino could offer. Enter the ESP8266 processors which offer faster speeds and lots and lots more memory. Wifi is also available but will not be required for this project unless we implemented a World High Score Table perhaps! There are newer versions, ESP32, available with even more power but are more expensive and we don’t need that level of performance for this project. I’m using a NodeMCU from Lolin, which is basically a breakout board for the ESP8266 so that you can use it easily on breadboards or small production runs using through hole.

Connections – very careful now!Looking at the back we can see +3v3 (this screen can be powered from 5v as well), several grounds (Gnd) and SCL/SDA. This shouldmean that this device is an I²C device and can be easily connected to our Arduino. Err… Think  again. This screen gave me no end of problems as connecting it to the  I²C connections and running any demo I could find on the internet did not get anything on the display. I went back and looked at the listing for this device, it stated SPI Bus not I²C ! So it began to become apparent that this screen had an SPI interface. SCL and SDA would logically seem to be SPI clock and data (MOSI) respectively but other pin labels didn’t match normal SPI protocol labels. Reading several resources for other different screens and looking at the source code for the examples in the Arduino IDE Examples library lead me to find the correct connections to power and use this screen.

Power is self explanatory. LED adds a little extra brightness to the screen but it does still work if not connected. I’ve seen resistors added in series here and even variable ones to vary the brightness but I’ve ran it directly connected on this screen with no issues and wouldn’t want it dimmer as its not ultra bright. It is actually on even when not connected giving adequate brightness in my opinion. SCL is the SPI clock and goes to the NodeMCU’s hardware SPI pin (pin D5). SDA is actually the SPI MOSI connection and goes to the NodeMCU’s SPI MOSI pin (D7). RS is a Regsiter Select pin for ST7735 driver chips, this maps to a variable called TFT_DC in the Adafruitcode (explained later) that I was using for testing. This controls whether we are sending a command to the ST7735 chip or actual data. I think that Adafruit call it DC meaning Data Control, but I’m not sure. On some boards it may even be referred to as A0. For our purposed we connect it to D4. RST is the screen reset and and is connected to pin D3. These last two can connect to any NodeMCU pins that are not used for other functions. CS is Chip Select (usually referred to as Slave Select in the SPI protocol) and again can connect to any pin but I use D2. If this is pulled low then this device can receive or send data on the SPI bus. If only one device in your design you could pull this low permanently and not use D2.

Driver CodeWhen presented with this board (as mentioned above) it was difficult to work out where wires should go and what driver software I needed for the display. Looking at the solitary chip on the board and Googling revealed nothing. So I went back to the sellers listing and found buried deep in a sub-page description the phrase “7735 drive”. Googling this revealed Adafruit had written some drivers for this chip for a board they had created (which also had an SD card slot on it as well). It was not surprising I didn’t find the 7735 chip on the board as this chip is designed to by embedded onto the back of the screen. It was being armed with this source code and other web pages dealing with different chip sets but similar displays that I managed to work out (with a little trial and error) the connections talked about previously above. Initially I used the Adafruit driver code but gave issues with this screen (as it was designed to work with the one they sell). Look below.

Also when the screen orientation is rotated (in software) so you can write to the display any way up then more things either correct themselves or mess up again.

Fixing the ST7735 driver to work with this screen.So we have some work to do still to make this work well with our display. The driver we have used to get this up and running was not designed for this display exactly. Things appear clipped and off screen. There were other issues with colour (i.e. red was blue and blue was red amongst other colour problems) and other graphics routines were not correct. I won’t bore you with all the tiny re-writes I did but just supply you with the new driver for this particular display. This driver is very specific, i.e. only targeting this display and resolution but it may well work with many other similar displays. At the time of writing I have no other displays to test with but will be expanding the driver code as and when required. The full driver code is available from the link below, add it into your Arduino in the usual manner (Adding libraries to the Arduino IDE.)

Load up the example code that should now be available at “Files->Examples->XTronical ST7735 Library->GraphicsTestESP8266”. This is basically the Adafruit example with just some tiny changes (It goes through all the tests for each rotational position of the screen) so that it uses the new driver file and slightly altered initialisation routine.

Want to display sensor readings in your ESP8266 projects without resorting to serial output? Then an I2C LCD display might be a better choice for you! It consumes only two GPIO pins which can also be shared with other I2C devices.

True to their name, these LCDs are ideal for displaying only text/characters. A 16×2 character LCD, for example, has an LED backlight and can display 32 ASCII characters in two rows of 16 characters each.

At the heart of the adapter is an 8-bit I/O expander chip – PCF8574. This chip converts the I2C data from an ESP8266 into the parallel data required for an LCD display.

If you are using multiple devices on the same I2C bus, you may need to set a different I2C address for the LCD adapter so that it does not conflict with another I2C device.

An important point here is that several companies manufacture the same PCF8574 chip, Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors, to name a few. And the I2C address of your LCD depends on the chip manufacturer.

So your LCD probably has a default I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it.

Connecting I2C LCD to ESP8266 is very easy as you only need to connect 4 pins. Start by connecting the VCC pin to the VIN on the ESP8266 and GND to ground.

Now we are left with the pins which are used for I2C communication. We are going to use the default I2C pins (GPIO#4 and GPIO#5) of the ESP8266. Connect the SDA pin to the ESP8266’s D2 (GPIO#4) and the SCL pin to the ESP8266’s D1 (GPIO#5).

After wiring up the LCD you’ll need to adjust the contrast of the display. On the I2C module you will find a potentiometer that you can rotate with a small screwdriver.

Plug in the ESP8266’s USB connector to power the LCD. You will see the backlight lit up. Now as you turn the knob on the potentiometer, you will start to see the first row of rectangles. If that happens, Congratulations! Your LCD is working fine.

The I2C address of your LCD depends on the manufacturer, as mentioned earlier. If your LCD has a Texas Instruments’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x27Hex. If your LCD has NXP Semiconductors’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x3FHex.

So your LCD probably has I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it. Luckily there’s an easy way to do this. Below is a simple I2C scanner sketch that scans your I2C bus and returns the address of each I2C device it finds.

After uploading the code, open the serial monitor at a baud rate of 115200 and press the EN button on the ESP8266. You will see the I2C address of your I2C LCD display.

But, before you proceed to upload the sketch, you need to make a small change to make it work for you. You must pass the I2C address of your LCD and the dimensions of the display to the constructor of the LiquidCrystal_I2C class. If you are using a 16×2 character LCD, pass the 16 and 2; If you’re using a 20×4 LCD, pass 20 and 4. You got the point!

In ‘setup’ we call three functions. The first function is init(). It initializes the LCD object. The second function is clear(). This clears the LCD screen and moves the cursor to the top left corner. And third, the backlight() function turns on the LCD backlight.

After that we set the cursor position to the third column of the first row by calling the function lcd.setCursor(2, 0). The cursor position specifies the location where you want the new text to be displayed on the LCD. The upper left corner is assumed to be col=0, row=0.

lcd.scrollDisplayRight() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the right. If you want the text to scroll continuously, you have to use this function inside a for loop.

lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the left. Similar to above function, use this inside a for loop for continuous scrolling.

If you find the characters on the display dull and boring, you can create your own custom characters (glyphs) and symbols for your LCD. They are extremely useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.

CGROM is used to store all permanent fonts that are displayed using their ASCII codes. For example, if we send 0x41 to the LCD, the letter ‘A’ will be printed on the display.

CGRAM is another memory used to store user defined characters. This RAM is limited to 64 bytes. For a 5×8 pixel based LCD, only 8 user-defined characters can be stored in CGRAM. And for 5×10 pixel based LCD only 4 user-defined characters can be stored.

Creating custom characters has never been easier! We have created a small application called Custom Character Generator. Can you see the blue grid below? You can click on any 5×8 pixel to set/clear that particular pixel. And as you click, the code for the character is generated next to the grid. This code can be used directly in your ESP8266 sketch.

After the library is included and the LCD object is created, custom character arrays are defined. The array consists of 8 bytes, each byte representing a row of a 5×8 LED matrix. In this sketch, eight custom characters have been created.

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).

It is a 0.91 inch OLED LCD display module.It has an OLED liquid crystal screen with self-luminous characteristics.It uses a very thin coating of organic materials and a glass substrate. When there is current passin...

It is a ESP8266 WIFI chip. It has an OLED display and a lithium battery interface,which can easily manage the charge and discharge of lithium batteries,and can be directly used for the development of handheld de...

Note:If you want to show the whole pitcure on the screen, it"s suggest using arduino mega2560. Because when you use Arduino UNO, thememory is not enough which cause the application simply ran out of memory.

This tutorial shows how to use the I2C LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) with the ESP32 using Arduino IDE. We’ll show you how to wire the display, install the library and try sample code to write text on the LCD: static text, and scroll long messages. You can also use this guide with the ESP8266.

Additionally, it comes with a built-in potentiometer you can use to adjust the contrast between the background and the characters on the LCD. On a “regular” LCD you need to add a potentiometer to the circuit to adjust the contrast.

Before displaying text on the LCD, you need to find the LCD I2C address. With the LCD properly wired to the ESP32, upload the following I2C Scanner sketch.

Displaying static text on the LCD is very simple. All you have to do is select where you want the characters to be displayed on the screen, and then send the message to the display.

The next two lines set the number of columns and rows of your LCD display. If you’re using a display with another size, you should modify those variables.

To display a message on the screen, first you need to set the cursor to where you want your message to be written. The following line sets the cursor to the first column, first row.

Scrolling text on the LCD is specially useful when you want to display messages longer than 16 characters. The library comes with built-in functions that allows you to scroll text. However, many people experience problems with those functions because:

In a 16×2 LCD there are 32 blocks where you can display characters. Each block is made out of 5×8 tiny pixels. You can display custom characters by defining the state of each tiny pixel. For that, you can create a byte variable to hold  the state of each pixel.

In summary, in this tutorial we’ve shown you how to use an I2C LCD display with the ESP32/ESP8266 with Arduino IDE: how to display static text, scrolling text and custom characters. This tutorial also works with the Arduino board, you just need to change the pin assignment to use the Arduino I2C pins.

This guide shows how to use the 0.96 inch SSD1306 OLED display with ESP8266 using Arduino IDE. We’ll show you how to write text, set different fonts, draw shapes and display bitmaps images.

In this example, we’re using I2C communication protocol. The most suitable pins for I2C communication in the ESP8266 are GPIO 5 (SCL) and GPIO 4 (SDA).

There are several libraries available to control the OLED display with the ESP8266. In this tutorial we’ll use two Adafruit libraries: Adafruit_SSD1306 library and Adafruit_GFX library.

We’ll program the ESP8266 using Arduino IDE, so you must have the ESP8266 add-on installed in your Arduino IDE. If you haven’t, follow the next tutorial first:

After wiring the OLED display to the ESP8266 and installing all required libraries, you can use one example from the library to see if everything is working properly.

Written by Limor Fried/Ladyada for Adafruit Industries, with contributions from the open source community. BSD license, check license.txt for more information All text above, and the splash screen below must be included in any redistribution.

Then, you define your OLED width and height. In this example, we’re using a 128×64 OLED display. If you’re using other sizes, you can change that in the SCREEN_WIDTH, and SCREEN_HEIGHT variables.

The library provides an additional method that you can use with shapes or text: the invertDisplay() method. Pass true as argument to invert the colors of the screen or false to get back to the original colors.

Please make sure that you have the SDA and SCL pins of the OLED display wired correctly. In case of the ESP8266, connect SDA pin to GPIO 4 (D2) and SCL pin to GPIO 5 (D1).

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen is an electronic display module and is very commonly used in various devices and circuits. These modules are preferred over seven segments and other multi segment LEDs. The reasons being: LCDs are economical; easily programmable; have no limitation of displaying special & even custom characters (unlike in seven segments), animations and so on.

A 16×2 LCD means it can display 16 characters per line and there are 2 such lines. In this LCD each character is displayed in 5×7 pixel matrix. The LCD Screens based on I2C interface consists of two signals: SCL and SDA, where SCL is the clock signal, and SDA is the data signal.

I think the Wire.begin() syntax is Wire.begin(SDA, SCL);. So, for the code to match the diagram it would be Wire.begin(4,3);. I also connected my display"s LCD Vcc to Vin on the NodeMCU which differs from the diagram. It works for me with these changes.

i know it"s late but..i"ve found some solution for this problem..at least it was for me..try change "lcd.backlight();" to "lcd.setBacklight((uint8_t)1);0

he copiado el programa en un nodemcu v3 de lolin en el IDE y cuando lo clequeo me aparece el siguiente error: Tampoco me funciona lo de dar corriente a traves del pin Vin a la lcd, le proporciono corriente a traves de un pin 3,3V

In IoT, LCD is rarely required, but some times its useful to monitor errors and connection related issues. In this tutorial we are interfacingI2C LCD with ESP8266 or ESP32.Both code examples are given.

This library is tested for different types of LCD displays like 16×2, 16×4, 20×2, 20×4 with both ESP32 and ESP8266, it also works with other ESP modules.

ESP8266 with 20×4 i2c, 1602 LCD adaptable to others, tested with ESP-201 and ESP-01 Compatible with the Arduino IDE 1.6.6 Library https://github.com/agnunez/ESP8266-I2C-LCD1602