arduino counter lcd display in stock
Can you help me expand this idea a bit? I want to build a punch counter for my son"s martial arts club. It will count the number of hits to a punching board (bag) in 45 seconds.
beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeep, a small counting display 1-45 seconds and a much larger display for the count (3 digits would suffice) followed by a long beep and stop and freeze the count until the next reset.
Do you want your Arduino projects to display status messages or sensor readings? Then these LCD displays can be a perfect fit. They are extremely common and fast way to add a readable interface to your project.
This tutorial will help you get up and running with not only 16×2 Character LCD, but any Character LCD (16×4, 16×1, 20×4 etc.) that is based on Hitachi’s LCD Controller Chip – HD44780.
When current is applied to these crystals, they become opaque, blocking the backlight that resides behind the screen. As a result that particular area will be dark compared to the others. And this is how the characters are displayed on the screen.
True to their name, these LCDs are ideal for displaying only text/characters. A 16×2 character LCD, for example, has an LED backlight and can display 32 ASCII characters in two rows of 16 characters each.
If you look closely you can see tiny rectangles for each character on the display and the pixels that make up a character. Each of these rectangles is a grid of 5×8 pixels.
The good news is that all of these displays are ‘swappable’, which means if you build your project with one you can just unplug it and use another size/color LCD of your choice. Your code will have to change a bit but at least the wiring remains the same!
Vo (LCD Contrast) controls the contrast and brightness of the LCD. Using a simple voltage divider with a potentiometer, we can make fine adjustments to the contrast.
RS (Register Select) pin is set to LOW when sending commands to the LCD (such as setting the cursor to a specific location, clearing the display, etc.) and HIGH when sending data to the LCD. Basically this pin is used to separate the command from the data.
R/W (Read/Write) pin allows you to read data from the LCD or write data to the LCD. Since we are only using this LCD as an output device, we are going to set this pin LOW. This forces it into WRITE mode.
E (Enable) pin is used to enable the display. When this pin is set to LOW, the LCD does not care what is happening on the R/W, RS, and data bus lines. When this pin is set to HIGH, the LCD processes the incoming data.
D0-D7 (Data Bus) pins carry the 8 bit data we send to the display. For example, if we want to see an uppercase ‘A’ character on the display, we set these pins to 0100 0001 (as per the ASCII table).
Now we will power the LCD. The LCD has two separate power connections; One for the LCD (pin 1 and pin 2) and the other for the LCD backlight (pin 15 and pin 16). Connect pins 1 and 16 of the LCD to GND and 2 and 15 to 5V.
Most LCDs have a built-in series resistor for the LED backlight. You’ll find this near pin 15 on the back of the LCD. If your LCD does not include such a resistor or you are not sure if your LCD has one, you will need to add one between 5V and pin 15. It is safe to use a 220 ohm resistor, although a value this high may make the backlight a bit dim. For better results you can check the datasheet for maximum backlight current and select a suitable resistor value.
Next we will make the connection for pin 3 on the LCD which controls the contrast and brightness of the display. To adjust the contrast we will connect a 10K potentiometer between 5V and GND and connect the potentiometer’s center pin (wiper) to pin 3 on the LCD.
That’s it. Now turn on the Arduino. You will see the backlight lit up. Now as you turn the knob on the potentiometer, you will start to see the first row of rectangles. If that happens, Congratulations! Your LCD is working fine.
Let’s finish connecting the LCD to the Arduino. We have already made the connections to power the LCD, now all we have to do is make the necessary connections for communication.
We know that there are 8 data pins that carry data to the display. However, HD44780 based LCDs are designed in such a way that we can communicate with the LCD using only 4 data pins (4-bit mode) instead of 8 (8-bit mode). This saves us 4 pins!
The sketch begins by including the LiquidCrystal library. The Arduino community has a library called LiquidCrystal which makes programming of LCD modules less difficult. You can find more information about the library on Arduino’s official website.
First we create a LiquidCrystal object. This object uses 6 parameters and specifies which Arduino pins are connected to the LCD’s RS, EN, and four data pins.
In the ‘setup’ we call two functions. The first function is begin(). It is used to specify the dimensions (number of columns and rows) of the display. If you are using a 16×2 character LCD, pass the 16 and 2; If you’re using a 20×4 LCD, pass 20 and 4. You got the point!
After that we set the cursor position to the second row by calling the function setCursor(). The cursor position specifies the location where you want the new text to be displayed on the LCD. The upper left corner is assumed to be col=0, row=0.
There are some useful functions you can use with LiquidCrystal objects. Some of them are listed below:lcd.home() function is used to position the cursor in the upper-left of the LCD without clearing the display.
lcd.scrollDisplayRight() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the right. If you want the text to scroll continuously, you have to use this function inside a for loop.
lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the left. Similar to above function, use this inside a for loop for continuous scrolling.
If you find the characters on the display dull and boring, you can create your own custom characters (glyphs) and symbols for your LCD. They are extremely useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.
CGROM is used to store all permanent fonts that are displayed using their ASCII codes. For example, if we send 0x41 to the LCD, the letter ‘A’ will be printed on the display.
CGRAM is another memory used to store user defined characters. This RAM is limited to 64 bytes. For a 5×8 pixel based LCD, only 8 user-defined characters can be stored in CGRAM. And for 5×10 pixel based LCD only 4 user-defined characters can be stored.
Creating custom characters has never been easier! We have created a small application called Custom Character Generator. Can you see the blue grid below? You can click on any 5×8 pixel to set/clear that particular pixel. And as you click, the code for the character is generated next to the grid. This code can be used directly in your Arduino sketch.
Hi guys in this tutorial we will see how to use ultrasonic sensor as a counter and output will be shown on LCD display. It will count number of times object passes in front of sensor. So let’s get started. For this you will need
Arduino Counter with LCD display and Push button TutorialLink sketch: https://github.com/makertut/counter-lcd-push-btn ::::::::::: SUPPORT CHANNEL :::::::::...
Here we count the number of times the push switch has been pressed. The Arduino detects a transition of input from a LOW state to the HIGH state during switch press; that is the value of counting variable increments for a positive edge triggering.
In the circuit, the push switch is connected to a digital pin of the Arduino; here at pin 9. When the push switch has pressed the LED ON for half a seconds and then OFF, it is provided just for an indication that the switch press has been detected or the value has been incremented by one.
The counter is designed for a positive edge trigger, hence it only increments the count variable on a positive edge irrespective of how long the switch is held ON. In order to do that we have added a variable called “prestate”. The counter value increments only when two conditions are satisfied, that is the input state is high and the value of prestate is 0. Once the switch is pressed, along with incrementing and flashing the LED the value of prestate also set to 1; as you can see in the code area inside the if condition.
If we use code as given below, without a variable to detect the previous state then the counter value keeps incrementing as long as the switch is held ON.
The arrangement is similar to above, the only difference is an additional input switch and a few lines of code to add the decrement function to the counter. Here, one switch press increments the value whereas the seconds switch decrements the value.
The below code is for an LCD interface with the Arduino using an I2C module, refer to the Arduino LCD interface to use an LCD display with or without an I2C adapter.
Liquid Crystal displays or LCDs have been used in electronics equipment since the late 1970s. LCD displays have the advantage of consuming very little current And they are ideal for your Arduino projects.
In this article and in the accompanying video I’ll show you how easy it is to add an LCD display to your next Arduino design. I’ll also show you a very popular Arduino Shield that has a keypad which you can use in your projects as well.
Today LCD displays are used in a variety of items from test equipment to televisions. They’re inexpensive and versatile, this makes them ideal for all sorts of designs.
LCD displays do not emit light. Instead they block the passage of light, like little windows which open and shut the let light through. The liquid crystals used inside LCD displays are sandwiched between two layers of polarized material. By changing the orientation of the liquid crystals they allow light to pass or they block the light entirely.
Because transmissive LCD displays (the type we will be using) work by blocking light they require a backlight. Several methods have been used to create back lights including electroluminescent panels and fluorescent tubes. these days the most common form of backlight is an LED, in fact so-called LED televisions are usually just LCD screens with an LED backlight system.
Another type of LCD display, the passive-matrix display, does not require a backlight, it works using reflected light. This type of display is often found in digital watches.
The principles of liquid crystals were discovered in the late 1880s but work on Modern LCD displays did not begin until the mid-1960s. a number of patents were filed in the early 1970s and in 1973 the Sharp Corporation introduced LCD displays for calculators.
The first color LCD displays were developed in the early 1980s but production units were not commonly available until the mid-1990s. By the late 1990s LCD displays were quite common.
A number of LCD displays are available for experimenters. These low-cost monochrome displays are ideal for use with microcontrollers like the Arduino and micro computers like the Raspberry Pi.
These displays are available in a number of different configurations. The part number for the display generally relates to the number of rows and columns in the display.
Common display configurations include 16 x 2, 16 x 4 and 20 x 4. All of these displays are used in a virtually identical fashion the only difference being the number of columns and rows they have.
The LCD1602 display module is a very popular and inexpensive LCD display. It is available in a number of different colors such as blue yellow and green and can easily be connected to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
In operation data is sent down the parallel data lines for the display. There are two types of data that can be sent to the display. The first type of data are the ASCII characters which are to be displayed on the display. The other type of data are the control characters that are used to activate the various display functions.
Brightness– This is the input for the brightness control voltage, which varies between 0 and 5 volts to control the display brightness. On some modules this pin is labeled V0.
Because the LCD module uses a parallel data input it requires 8 connections to the host microcontroller for the data alone. Add that to the other control pins and it consumes a lot of connections. On an Arduino Uno half of the I/O pins would be taken up by the display, which can be problematic if you want to use the I/O pins for other input or output devices.
We will begin our experiments by hooking up the LCD1602 to an Arduino Uno and running a few of the example sketches included with the Arduino IDE. This will allow you to get familiar with the display without needing to write any code.
We need to hookup our LCD display to our Arduino. The display can use any of the Arduino digital I/O pins as it has no special requirements, but if you hook it up as I’ve illustrated here you can run the example sketches without needing to make any modifications.
In addition to the LCD1602 display ands the Arduino Uno you will need a 10K trimpot ot potentiometer, this is used a s a brightness control for the display. You’ll also need a 220 ohm resistor to drop the voltage for the displays LED backlight.
The Arduino IDE includestheLiquidCrystallibraryand this library has a number of example sketches. I’ll go over three of them here but you can also try the other ones.
The sketch starts with a number of credits and a description of the required hardware hookup. You’ll note that this is the same hookup you just performed on your Arduino and LCD module.
We then initialize an object that we call “lcd” using the pinouts of the LCD display. If you decide to hook up your display to different pins then you’ll need to modify this section.
That ends the loop, so we start back at the top of the loop and repeat. The result will be a counter on the second line that counts seconds from the htime the Arduino was last reset.
Load the sketch up to your Arduino and observe your display. If you don’t see anything try adjusting the brightness control that you wired to the display.
The second example we will try isthe Scroll sketch. Scrolling is a useful technique when you can’t get your text to fit on one line of the LCD display.
In the loop the code demonstrates the use of thescrollDisplayLeftandscrollDisplayRightfunctions. As their names imply they move the text in a left or right direction.
Finally the last counter moves the text 16 positions to the left again, which will restore it back to the center of the display. The loop then repeats itself.
Custom characters are useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard 127-character ASCII character set. Thi scan be useful for creating custom displays for your project.
A character on the display is formed in a 5 x 8 matrix of blocks so you need to define your custom character within that matrix. To define the character you’ll use thecreateCharfunctionof the LiquidCrystal library. You are limited to defining a maximum of eight characters.
The Custom Character demonstration requires one additional component to be wired to the Arduino, a potentiometer (10K or greater) wired up to deliver a variable voltage to analog input pin A0.
As with the previous sketches we examined this one starts by loading theLiquidCrystallibrary and defining an object calledlcdwith the connection information for the display. It then moves on to define the custom characters.
The last two arrays,amsUpandarmsDowndefine the shape of a little “stickman”, or “stickperson” if you want to be politically correct! This is done to show how we can animate a character on the display.
Finally the setup routine ends by printing a line to the first row of the LCD display. The line makes use of two of the custom characters, the “heart” and the “smiley”.
We begin by reading the value of the voltage on pin A0 using the ArduinoanalogReadfunction. As the Arduino has a 10-bit analog to digital converter this will result in a reading ranging from 0 to 1023.
We then use an Arduinomapfunction to convert this reading into a range from 200 to 1000. This value is then assigned to an integer calleddelayTime, which as its name implies represents a time delay period.
One thing you may have noticed about using the LCD display module with the Arduino is that it consumes a lot of connections. Even in 4-wire mode there are still a total of seven connections made to the Arduino digital I/O pins. As an Arduino Uno has only 14 digital I/O pins that’s half of them used up for the display.
In other cases you would need to resort to using some of the analog pins as digital pins or even moving up to an Arduino Mega which has many more I/O pins.
But there is another solution. Use the I2C bus adapter for the LCD display and connect using I2C. This only consumes two I/O pins and they aren’t even part of the set of digital I/O pins.
The bus has evolved to be used as an ideal method of communicating between microcontrollers, integrated circuits, sensors and micro computers. You can use it to allow multiple Arduinos to talk to each other, to interface numerous sensors and output devices or to facilitate communications between a Raspberry Pi and one or more Arduinos.
In I2C communications there is the concept of Master and Slave devices. There can be multiples of each but there can only be one Master at any given moment. In most Arduino applications one Arduino is designated Master permanently while the other Arduinos and peripherals are the Slaves.
The I2C Adapter for the LCD display is a tiny circuit board with 16 male header pins soldered to it. These pins are meant to be connected directly to the 16-pin connection on the LCD1602 display (or onto other displays that use the same connection scheme).
The device also has a 4-pin connector for connection to the I2C bus. In addition there is a small trimpot on the board, this is the LCD display brightness control.
Most Arduino Unos also have some dedicated pins for I2C, these are internally connected to A4 and A5 and are usually located above the 14 digital I/O pins. Some models of the Uno have additional I2C connectors as well.
Note how much easier it is to use the I2C connection, which does not consume any of the Arduino Unos 14 digital I/O pins. Since A4 and A5 are being used for the I2C bus they can’t be used as analog inputs in this configuration.
Load this sketch into your Arduino then open your serial monitor. You’ll see the I2C address of your I2C LCD display adapter. You can then make note of this address and use it in the sketches we’ll be looking at now.
In order to run the subsequent sketches you’ll need to install another library. This is theNewLiquidCrystallibrarywhich, as its name implies, is an improved version of the LiquidCrystal library packaged with your Arduino IDE.
The sketch starts by loading the ArduinoWirelibrary. This is the Arduino library that facilitates communications over I2C and it’s part of your Arduino IDE installation.
On the next line we define the connections to the LCD display module from the I2C Adapter,. Note that these are NOT the connections from the Arduino, they are the connections used by the chip on the adapter itself.
In setup we set the size of the display and then print “Hello world!” on the first line in the first position. After a short delay we print “How are you?” on the second line.
The next demo uses theautoscrollfunction to scroll some text. We first print the text “Scroll demo – “ and then implement a counter to count from 0 to 9 while scrolling the text.
Load the sketch and run it on your Arduino. If you can’t get it to work check out the address and connection information to be sure you have it right.
As you can see the DHT22 is connected with its output tied to pin 7 of the Arduino. The other two connections are 5 volts and ground. Note that pin 3 of the DHT22 is not used.
This sketch also makes use of theDHTlibrary from Adafruit. We used this library in a previous article, “Using the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor with Arduino” so you may want to take a look at that one in order to get it installed.
The key thing to note is that this library is dependant upon another Adafruit library, theirUnified Sensorlibrary. Both can be installed using the Library Manager in your Arduino IDE.
The sketch is similar to our demo sketch in that it creates an “lcd” object with the I2C and display connection information. It also defines a couple of parameters for the DHT22 sensor, as well as some floating variables to hold the temperature and humidity values.
Note that this displays the temperature in Celsius. If you want to change this to Fahrenheit its a simple matter of using some math. The formula( temp * 1.8 ) + 32will convert the results to Fahrenheit.
So far we have used the LCD1602 display module for all of our experiments. For our final demonstration we’ll switch to a popular Arduino shield that contains a LCD1602 along with some push buttons.
The LCD Keypad Shield is available from several different manufacturers. The device fits onto an Arduino Uno or an Arduino Mega and simplifies adding an LCD display to your project.
The Reset button is simply connected to the Arduino Reset pin and works just like the Reset button on the Arduino itself. This is common on many shields as the shields physically cover the Reset button.
Instead the buttons are connected to a resistor array that acts as a voltage divider. The entire array is connected to the Arduino’s analog A0 pin. One pin for five push buttons.
Note that the LCD is being used in 4-wire mode. The LCD itself is the same one used on the LCD1602 module, so all of the code for that module will work with the LCD Keypad Shield as well.
Now that you know how the LCD Keypad module works and which Arduino pins it uses all that remains is to install it onto your Arduino and load the demo sketch.
One thing – once the shield is installed on the Arduino you won’t have easy access to the unused I/O pins to connect any sensors or output devices you may want to use (although the demo sketch doesn’t need anything else connected). There are a couple of ways to get around this:
Use a shield that exposes the pins for prototyping before you install the LCD Keypad shield. In the video associated with this article I use a “Screw Shield” that brings all of the Arduino I/O pins out to a series of screw connectors. There are other similar shields. Using one of these shields is the easiest way to work with the LCD Keypad shield, as well as other Arduino shields.
The sketch begins by including theLiquidCrystallibrary. You can use the original one or the one includes with theNewLiquidCrystallibrary. We then set up an object with the LCD connections, note that these are just hard-coded as they won’t change.
Next we define a number of constants, one for each of the push buttons. Note that nothing is defined for the Reset button as it simply mimics the Arduino Reset button, however a constant is defined for the “none” condition.
After that we define a function calledread_LCD_buttons(). This function reads the value on analog port A0 and returns an integer corresponding to the button integers we defined earlier. Note that the function adds approximately 50 to each of the manufacturers specified values to account for intolerances in the resistors in the voltage divider.
We start the loop by placing the cursor 9 spaces over on the second line. We then use themillisfunction to display a counter that counts the time since the Arduino was reset. This is to test the Reset button.
We then call ourread_LCD_buttons()function and use it to display the value of the push button, right before the counter. Then we end the loop and do it again.
Load the code onto the Arduino and run it. You should see the value of each button as you press it, along with a counter that increments each second. If you press Reset the counter should reset itself back to zero.
As you can see LCD displays are pretty simple to use thanks to the availability of some excellent libraries for the Arduino. As these displays are also very inexpensive they will make an ideal addition to many of your Arduino projects.
And finally the LCD Keypad Shield is a convenient method of adding both a display and a simple keypad to your project, no wiring or soldering required.
I am working on a project to calculate line frequency meter by reciprocal counting with Arduino. I am trying to print the the result on a 16*2 LCD but it is not displaying anything. It just gets on and stuck there. I got the project details from this website Line Frequency Meter Based On Reciprocal Counting