Chapter 7. LCD displays
This chapter covers
- Communicating with the common Hitachi HD44780 parallel LCD
- Building a serial LCD weather station
- Displaying text and images on the KS0108 graphic LCD
By now you’ve begun to master the art of interacting with your Arduino in both the analog and digital domains. You’ve made LEDs blink, you’ve transformed piezos into pentatonic musical keyboards, and in chapter 6 you graduated from interfacing with everyday components such as potentiometers to working with ultrasonic and infrared distance sensors.
Aside from blinking your first LEDs in chapter 1, most of your interaction with the Arduino thus far has been concerned with obtaining real-world input and output from your Arduino. Most of the work you do with the Arduino will be concerned with doing exactly that. But you’ll also encounter scenarios where your project will need to receive information back from the Arduino, so in this chapter we’ll revisit the realm of visual feedback by exploring various liquid crystal displays, more commonly called LCDs.
LCDs are embeddable screens found in all sorts of consumer electronics. There are many different types of LCDs, however, so in section 7.1 you’ll learn about the common LCDs you’ll use in your future Arduino endeavors.
Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) have become ubiquitous: from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, your day is guided by many interactions with LCD screens.