This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16x2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB-backlight background! That means you can change the background color to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse, or just leave it off for a neutral background. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight.
Adafruit had these custom made to our specification so that you can use them in existing LCD projects and they'll still work - just that only the red LED will be used. The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~20mA per LED. There's a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!
Comes with a single 16x2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Adafruit's tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!
For more information, check out this detailed step-by-step tutorial for both Arduino & CircuitPython.
Technical Details
- 16 characters wide, 2 rows
- Black text on multi-color background
- Connection port is 0.1" pitch, single row for easy breadboarding and wiring
- Pins are documented on the back of the LCD to assist in wiring it up
- Single RGB LED backlight included can be dimmed easily with a resistor or PWM and uses much less power than LCD with EL (electroluminescent) backlights
- Each R, G, & B LED has a 200 ohm resistor in series so you can power the backlight from 3V or 5VDC. R forward voltage is ~2.2V, G & B are ~3.4V
- Can be fully controlled with only 6 digital lines! (Any analog/digital pins can be used) and 3 PWM pins for the backlight
- Built in character set supports English/Japanese text, see the HD44780 datasheet for the full character set
- Up to 8 extra characters can be created for custom glyphs or 'foreign' language support
- Comes with 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header
- Screen Dimensions: 27mm x 71mm / 1.1" x 2.8"
Revision History:
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Note: As of Thursday, May 26th 2016, we are shipping the revised version of this product. The 4 mounting holes are now 3.2mm (.125") instead of 3mm (.118”)
Because these were custom made, we don't have a full datasheet, however, the dimensions and pins should match this diagram and the controller will be a HD44780-compatible, see the HD44780 datasheet with the detailed commands for control
For more information, check out this detailed step-by-step tutorial for both Arduino & CircuitPython
