Serial UART 16x2 LCD

Introduction

The serial UART 16x2 LCD allows you to control a parallel based LCD over a single-wire serial interface. The serial LCD takes care of all the HD44780 commands allowing seamless integration with any micro that can communicate over a wide range of TTL serial baud rates. The

Communication with Serial 16x2 LCD requires 5V TTL serial at a default baud rate of 9600bps (8-N-1). You can adjust the baud to any standard rate between 2400 and 38400bps. The power, ground and RX pins are all broken out to a 4-pin 2.54mm pitch header.

Serial 16x2 LCD has the ability to dim the backlight to conserve power if needed. There is also a potentiometer on the backpack to adjust the contrast.

Features

• Embedded PIC 16F88 utilizes onboard UART for greater communication accuracy
• Baud rates of 9600
• Greater processing speed at 10MHz
• Incoming buffer stores up to 80 characters
• Backlight transistor can handle up to 1A
• Pulse width modulation of backlight allows direct control of backlight brightness and current consumption
• All surface mount design allows a backpack that is half the size of the original
• Faster boot-up time
• Boot-up display can be turned on/off via firmware

Schematic

• Schematics

Specification

• Basic 16 character by 2 line display with serial interface.
• Black text on green background.
• Utilizes the extremely common HD44780 compatible parallel interface chipset.
• Only requires one IO.
• The background light can be controlled by firmware. 
• The contrast is adjustable by potentiometer.
• Interface is single wire UART with 5V TTL.

Usage

Hardware Installation

• Connect the 5V of Serial LCD to 5V on Arduino.
• Connect GND of Serial LCD to GND of Arduino.
• Connect RX of Serial LCD to digital 3 of Arduino.

Programming

The following is the sample code assuming that the RX of serial LCD is connected to digital 2 of Arduino. The following code has been tested on Arduino IDE 1.0.1.

<syntaxhighlight lang="c">

1. include <SoftwareSerial.h>

1. define txPin 2

SoftwareSerial LCD = SoftwareSerial(0, txPin); // since the LCD does not send data back to the Arduino, we should only define the txPin const int LCDdelay=10; // conservative, 2 actually works

// wbp: goto with row & column void lcdPosition(int row, int col) {

 LCD.write(0xFE);   //command flag
 LCD.write((col + row*64 + 128));    //position 
 delay(LCDdelay);

} void clearLCD(){

 LCD.write(0xFE);   //command flag
 LCD.write(0x01);   //clear command.
 delay(LCDdelay);

} void backlightOn() { //turns on the backlight

 LCD.write(0x7C);   //command flag for backlight stuff
 LCD.write(157);    //light level.
 delay(LCDdelay);

} void backlightOff(){ //turns off the backlight

 LCD.write(0x7C);   //command flag for backlight stuff
 LCD.write(128);     //light level for off.
  delay(LCDdelay);

} void serCommand(){ //a general function to call the command flag for issuing all other commands

 LCD.write(0xFE);

}

void setup() {

 pinMode(txPin, OUTPUT);
 LCD.begin(9600);
 backlightOn() ;
 clearLCD();
 lcdPosition(0,0);
 LCD.print("Hello world from LinkSprite!");

}

void loop() { }

</syntaxhighlight>

FAQ

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Support

If you have questions or other better design ideas, you can go to our forum to discuss or creat a ticket for your issue at linksprite support.

Resources

• PIC16F88 Datasheet

See Also

Other related products and resources.

Licensing

This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 Source code and libraries are licensed under GPL/LGPL, see source code files for details.