This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. 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.
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 black-on-red). 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!
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
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