1 July 2013

Really, we love LEDs. You can never have enough. But sometimes the odd status LED is just not enough to see what's happening in your project.

Embedded Adventurer Richard Mullens shows off his Rasberry Pi displaying text on the LCD-1602

It's time like this you need to stretch things to use an LCD display - but the problem is that most of them require many microcontroller pins to communicate with the display. So it's nice to find a display that has a (synchronous) serial interface that only needs a few pins. And it would be nice if the display was available with a 3.3V interface (LCD-1602-3.3V) as well as the usual 5V (LCD-1602-5V). Hey, why not stock both? So that's what we did.

16 characters, 2 lines, 3.3V and 5V models, a great price, daylight readable, backlight, and lead-free. And cheap! Get them while they're hot!

Thanks to Embedded Adventurer Richard Mullens from sunny UK, who has shared the Python script he developed that allows easy communcations with the display.