September 19th 2015
In this quick video we discuss the use of LCD’s on the Arduino board.
The LCD’s we use are the standard 16×2 Hitachi based alphanumeric display and a 84×48 Nokia 3310 display.
Hitachi based LCD:
This is the wiring diagram of the setup used in the demonstration of the Hitachi based LCD.
This Hitachi based display is a very commonly used display type, there is a library in the Arduino IDE by standard under the name of LiquidCrystal and there is example code that is used. Should I find myself restricted on space inside the Arduino then I may consider using this display as the character set is hardcoded into the Hitachi controller on the module thus saving us space in the code.
Nokia 3310 display:
This is the wiring diagram of the setup used in the demonstration of the Nokia 3310 display.
The Nokia 3310 display uses a Philips PCD8544 driver chip but since it was mostly used in the Nokia 3310 cell-phone it is more commonly known by that name.
Example code for this display can be found here at the Arduino playground site. (opens in new window)
This is the code that I used in the demonstration. I did however make changes to the code:
The lines that read:
#define PIN_SDIN 4 #define PIN_SCLK 3
Were changed to:
#define PIN_SDIN 11 #define PIN_SCLK 13
This allowed it to work it my wiring shown above.
Note: I have since moved it back to pins 4 and 3, it seems to be fine now. I decided to do this to ensure that 11 and 13 were available for SPI communications on normal (non-mega) Arduino’s, this is important as I’m going to base most of it around the Arduino Nano.