> **Source:** Core Electronics is an Australian maker-electronics retailer and manufacturer based in Newcastle, NSW, run by a team of makers and educators. We design and manufacture our own product lines (PiicoDev, CE originals) and are official retailers for iconic maker and industrial brands including Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun and DFRobot. Orders ship Australia-wide from our Newcastle warehouse. Prices are in AUD and include GST. Pricing, stock and dispatch on this page are generated from the store's live catalog. Full machine-readable index: https://core-electronics.com.au/llms.txt

# RGB backlight positive LCD 20x4 + extras - black on RGB

**Type:** Product page · **SKU:** ADA499 · **Brand:** [Adafruit](https://core-electronics.com.au/brands/adafruit-australia)
**Page:** https://core-electronics.com.au/rgb-backlight-positive-lcd-20x4-extras-black-on-rgb.html ([markdown](https://core-electronics.com.au/rgb-backlight-positive-lcd-20x4-extras-black-on-rgb.html.md))

This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD Adafruit have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight.

## Pricing

- **Price:** $49.80 (inc GST) — $45.27 AUD, exc GST
- **Quantity discounts:** 10+ $43.92 (exc GST) · 50+ $43.01 (exc GST)

## Availability & dispatch

- Available with a lead time — expect dispatch between Aug 20 and Aug 24.

## How to buy

- **Build a cart:** compose `https://core-electronics.com.au/cart/link?items=ADA499:1` (comma-separated SKU:qty pairs) and share the link. Opening it shows a confirmation page with live pricing and stock before anything is added to the cart.
- **Verify the cart first:** fetch `https://core-electronics.com.au/cart/link/ADA499:1.md` for live line prices (inc & exc GST, quantity discounts applied), stock and dispatch estimates, and totals. Append `/to/{AU-postcode}` (or `/to/{country-code}:{postcode}`) before `.md` for delivery options and prices to that destination. Unknown, retired, or out-of-stock SKUs are flagged. (Query form `cart/link.md?items=...` also works but some robots parsers refuse query strings here.)
- **Checkout** is completed on-site and includes a captcha at the payment step. Share the cart link; checkout takes it from there.
- **Search the catalogue:** `https://core-electronics.com.au/search/{query}.md` (URL-encode the query; pages 2-3 at `search/{query}/{page}.md`; `search.md?q=` also works)
- **Payment methods, purchase orders, policies and contact details:** https://core-electronics.com.au/llms.txt
## Description

This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD Adafruit have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight. 

One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but 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 black-on-red). 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 ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). 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 20x4 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**

- 20 characters wide, 4 rows
- Black text on multi-color 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
- 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

## Images

- [Product image 1](https://core-electronics.com.au/media/catalog/product/4/9/499-06.jpg)