This sketch prints "Hobbytronics" to the LCD and shows the time. The LiquidCrystal library works with all LCD displays that are compatible with the Hitachi HD44780 driver. There are many of them out there, and you can usually tell them by the 16-pin interface.
* LiquidCrystal Library - Hobbytronics Demonstrates the use a 16x2 LCD display.
The PWM output to control the contrast is done in the setup routine, however, if you wanted to be able to control the contrast manually, then the addition of two push buttons and a bit more coding would allow you to increase and decrease the contrast in simple steps within the program. Here are the pinouts from the LCD and the corresponding pin connection on the Arduinoīelow is a mockup of the wiring connections and the output displayed on the screenĪnd here is the Arduino Sketch. You may want to increase or decrease this figure to get the correct contrast on your LCD screen. We have set the PWM output initially to 50 (output is ON about 20% of the time) to give a value approximating 1V. A voltage of approx 0.5V to 1V is about right, but depends on the ambient temperature. The lower the voltage the higher the contrast and vice versa. The contrast pin on the LCD requires a fairly small voltage for ideal display conditions. A 100uF capacitor is connected between the PWM output and ground. Pin 9 is used as the PWM output and this connects to the Vo contrast pin on the LCD (pin 3). Instead we will use one of the Arduino PWM outputs, smoothed by a capacitor, to create a simple Digital to Analog output which will allow us to control the screen contrast digitally from within our program. Just to be different, we will make a small enhancement and do away with the Potentiometer that is normally required to adjust the screen contrast. We will use a similar LCD (Pololu 16x2 Character LCD 773 or 772) The Arduino IDE comes with an example LCD sketch which uses an Hitachi HD44780 compatible LCD. We are now going to add an LCD display to our Arduino.