WEEK 6

Date: 2/11/2016 (Wednesday)
Title : Research and findings

In this week I’m continuing my research about LCD (Liquid Crystal Display). In my project, I would like to interface arduino with LCD. 

Introduction of LCD

 LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen is an electronic display module and find a wide range of applications. A 16x2 LCD display is very basic 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 16x2 LCD means it can display 16 characters per line and there are 2 such lines. In this LCD each character is displayed in 5x7 pixel matrix. This LCD has two registers, namely, Command and Data.

This is a datasheet of LCD 16x2

From datasheet above, LCD 16x2 can using 16 pin(for 8 bit) and 12 pin(for 4 bit). I try to connected  the lcd to my arduino.

Arduino LCD 16x2 Display  interface (4 bit)

If you can see, LCD 16x2 is using many i/o from Arduino Uno port. To save the i/o port, I found the solution by using 2IC LCD backpack. I just only use 4 wires to interface my arduino which is GND,VCC,SDA and SCL.

LCD 16x2 with 2IC lcd backpack