This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark/black background! That means you can change the character display colors to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person
One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but you can use them in existing LCD projects and they'll still work - just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear red-on-black). 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 ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). 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 20x4 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header.
For more information, check out our detailed step-by-step tutorial for both Arduino & CircuitPython
Technical Details
- 20 characters wide, 4 rows
- Multi-color text on dark 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
- 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
This is the datasheet for the display. The controller is a a HD44780-compatible, see the HD44780 datasheet with the detailed commands for control
Check out our detailed step-by-step Arduino+LCD tutorial
