RGB backlight positive LCD 16×2 extras – black on RGB

Description

This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16×2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB-backlight background! That means you can change the background color to anything you want – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse, or just leave it off for a neutral background. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brighness you have for the backlight.

We had these custom made to our 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. 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 16×2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!

16 characters wide, 2 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

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″

Because these were custom made, we don’t have a full datasheet, however, the dimensions and pins should match this diagram and the controller will be a HD44780-compatible, see the HD44780 datasheet with the detailed commands for control

Check out our detailed step-by-step Arduino+LCD tutorial