RGB backlight negative LCD 16x2 + extras - RGB on black

SKU: ADA399 Brand: Adafruit

Retired Product

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This product has been retired. It is no longer available, but this page has been kept for reference.

This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16x2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark/black background! That means you can change the character display colors to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person

Adafruit had these custom made to Adafruit's specification so that you can use them in existing LCD projects and they'll still work - just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear red-on-black). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~20mA per LED. There's a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!

Comes with a single 16x2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Adafruit's tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!

Technical Details

Note: As of Tuesday, April 5th 2016, Adafruit are shipping the revised version of this product. The 4 mounting holes are now 3.2mm (.125") instead of 3mm (.118")

Specifications
16 characters wide, 2 rows
Multi-color text on dark background
Connection port is 0.1" pitch, single row for easy breadboarding and wiring
Pins are documented on the back of the LCD to assist in wiring it up
Single RGB LED backlight included can be dimmed easily with a resistor or PWM and uses much less power than LCD with EL (electroluminescent) backlights
Each R, G, & B LED has a 200 ohm resistor in series so you can power the backlight from 3V or 5VDC. R forward voltage is ~2.2V, G & B are ~3.4V
Can be fully controlled with only 6 digital lines! (Any analog/digital pins can be used) and 3 PWM pins for the backlight
Built in character set supports English/Japanese text, see the HD44780 datasheet for the full character set
Up to 8 extra characters can be created for custom glyphs or 'foreign' language support
Comes with 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header
Screen Dimensions: 27mm x 71mm / 1.1" x 2.8"

The controller will be a HD44780-compatible, see the HD44780 datasheet with the detailed commands for control

Check out Adafruit's detailed step-by-step Arduino LCD tutorial

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Retired

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