LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY

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. The command register stores the command instructions given to the LCD. A command is an instruction given to LCD to do a predefined task like initializing it, clearing its screen, setting the cursor position, controlling display etc. The data register stores the data to be displayed on the LCD. The data is the ASCII value of the character to be displayed on the LCD. Click to learn more about internal structure of a LCD.

FEATURES
5 x 8 dots with cursor Built-in controller (KS 0066 or Equivalent) + 5V power supply (Also available for + 3V) 1/16 duty cycle B/L to be driven by pin 1, pin 2 or pin 15, pin 16 or A.K (LED) N.V. optional for + 3V power supply Optional: Smaller character size (2.95 mm x 4.35 mm) LED can be driven by pin 1, pin 2, or A and K Compliant to RoHS directive 2002/95/EC

PIN DESCRIPTION
The most commonly used LCDs found in the market today are 1 Line, 2 Line or 4 Line LCDs which have only 1 controller and support at most of 80 characters, whereas LCDs supporting more than 80 characters make use of 2 HD44780 controllers.

PIN 1 2 3 4

SYMBOL VSS VCC VEE RS

R/W

EN

DESCRIPTION FUNCTION Ground 0V Main Power Supply +5V Power Supply to Contrast adjustment by providing control contrast a variable resistor through Register Select RS=0 to select Command Register RS=1 to select Data Register Read/write R/W=0 to write to the register R/W=1 to read from the register Enable A high to low pulse (minimum 450ns wide) is given when data is sent to data pins To display letters or numbers, their ASCII codes are sent to data pins (with RS=1).Also instruction command codes are sent to these pins.

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

DB0 DB1 DB2 DB3 DB4 DB5 DB6 DB7 LED+ LED-

8 Bit Data Pins

Backlight VCC Backlight Ground

+5V 0V

LCD INTERFACE WITH MICROCONTROLLER

The LCD requires 3 control lines (RS, R/W & EN) & 8 (or 4) data lines. The number on data lines depends on the mode of operation. If operated in 8-bit mode then 8 data lines + 3 control lines i.e. total 11 lines are required. When RS is low (0), the data is to be treated as a command. When RS is high (1), the data being sent is considered as text data which should be displayed on the screen. When R/W is low (0), the information on the data bus is being written to the LCD. When RW is high (1), the program is effectively reading from the LCD. Most of the times there is no need to read from the LCD so this line can directly be connected to Gnd thus saving one controller line. The ENABLE pin is used to latch the data present on the data pins. A HIGH LOW signal is required to latch the data. The LCD interprets and executes our command at the instant the EN line is brought low. If you never bring EN low, your instruction will never be executed.