arduino projects with lcd screen price

Adding a display to your Arduino can serve many purposes. Since a common use for microcontrollers is reading data from sensors, a display allows you to see this data in real-time without needing to use the serial monitor within the Arduino IDE. It also allows you to give your projects a personal touch with text, images, or even interactivity through a touch screen.

Transparent Organic Light Emitting Diode (TOLED) is a type of LED that, as you can guess, has a transparent screen. It builds on the now common OLED screens found in smartphones and TVs, but with a transparent display, offers up some new possibilities for Arduino screens.

Take for example this brilliant project that makes use of TOLED displays. By stacking 10 transparent OLED screens in parallel, creator Sean Hodgins has converted a handful of 2D screens into a solid-state volumetric display. This kind of display creates an image that has 3-dimensional depth, taking us one step closer to the neon, holographic screens we imagine in the future.

Crystalfontz has a tiny monochrome (light blue) 1.51" TOLED that has 128x56 pixels. As the technology is more recent than the following displays in this list, the cost is higher too. One of these screens can be purchased for around $26, but for certain applications, it might just be worth it.

The liquid crystal display (LCD) is the most common display to find in DIY projects and home appliances alike. This is no surprise as they are simple to operate, low-powered, and incredibly cheap.

This type of display can vary in design. Some are larger, with more character spaces and rows; some come with a backlight. Most attach directly to the board through 8 or 12 connections to the Arduino pins, making them incompatible with boards with fewer pins available. In this instance, buy a screen with an I2C adapter, allowing control using only four pins.

Available for only a few dollars (or as little as a couple of dollars on AliExpress with included I2C adapter), these simple displays can be used to give real-time feedback to any project.

The screens are capable of a large variety of preset characters which cover most use cases in a variety of languages. You can control your LCD using the Liquid Crystal Library provided by Arduino. The display() and noDisplay() methods write to the LCD, as shown in the official tutorial on the Arduino website.

Are you looking for something simple to display numbers and a few basic characters? Maybe you are looking for something with that old-school arcade feel? A seven-segment display might suit your needs.

These simple boards are made up of 7 LEDs (8 if you include the dot), and work much like normal LEDs with a common Anode or Cathode connection. This allows them to take one connection to V+ (or GND for common cathode) and be controlled from the pins of your Arduino. By combining these pins in code, you can create numbers and several letters, along with more abstract designs—anything you can dream up using the segments available!

These tiny LCD screens are monochrome and have a screen size of 84 x 48 pixels, but don"t let that fool you. Coming in at around $2 on AliExpress, these displays are incredibly cheap and usually come with a backlight as standard.

Depending on which library you use, the screen can display multiple lines of text in various fonts. It"s also capable of displaying images, and there is free software designed to help get your creations on screen. While the refresh rate is too slow for detailed animations, these screens are hardy enough to be included in long-term, always-on projects.

For a step up in resolution and functionality, an OLED display might be what you are looking for. At first glance, these screens look similar to the 5110 screens, but they are a significant upgrade. The standard 0.96" screens are 128 x 64 monochrome, and come with a backlight as standard.

They connect to your Arduino using I2C, meaning that alongside the V+ and GND pins, only two further pins are required to communicate with the screen. With various sizes and full color options available, these displays are incredibly versatile.

For a project to get you started with OLED displays, our Electronic D20 build will teach you everything you need to know -- and you"ll end up with the ultimate geeky digital dice for your gaming sessions!

These displays can be used in the same way as the others we have mentioned so far, but their refresh rate allows for much more ambitious projects. The basic monochrome screen is available on Amazon.

Thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT LCDs) are in many ways another step up in quality when it comes to options for adding a screen to your Arduino. Available with or without touchscreen functionality, they also add the ability to load bitmap files from an on-board microSD card slot.

Arduino have an official guide for setting up their non-touchscreen TFT LCD screen. For a video tutorial teaching you the basics of setting up the touchscreen version, YouTuber educ8s.tv has you covered:

With the touchscreen editions of these screens costing less than $10 on AliExpress, these displays are another great choice for when you need a nice-looking display for your project.

Looking for something a little different? An E-paper (or E-ink depending on who you ask) display might be right for you. These screens differ from the others giving a much more natural reading experience, it is no surprise that this technology is the cornerstone of almost every e-reader available.

The reason these displays look so good is down to the way they function. Each "pixel" contains charged particles between two electrodes. By switching the charge of each electrode, you can influence the negatively charged black particles to swap places with the positively charged white particles.

This article has covered most options available for Arduino displays, though there are definitely more weird and wonderful ways to add feedback to your DIY devices.

Now that you have an idea of what is out there, why not incorporate a screen into your DIY smart home setup? If retro gaming is more your thing, why not create some retro games on Arduino?

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen is an electronic display module and find a wide range of applications. A 16x2 LCD display is very basic module and is very commonly used in various devices and circuits. These modules are preferred over seven segments and other multi segment LEDs. The reasons being: LCDs are economical; easily programmable; have no limitation of displaying special & even custom characters (unlike in seven segments), animations and so on.

A 16x2 LCD means it can display 16 characters per line and there are 2 such lines. In this LCD each character is displayed in 5x7 pixel matrix. This LCD has two registers, namely, Command and Data.

The Arduino board has a wide variety of compatible displays that you can use in your electronic projects. In most projects, it’s very useful to give the user some sort of feedback from the Arduino.

With the TFT display you can display colorful images or graphics. This module has a resolution of 480 x 320. This module includes the SD card socket and SPI FLASH circuit.

This is a tiny display with just 1 x 0.96 Inch. This display has a black background, and displays characters in white. There are other similar displays that can show the characters in other colors.

An LCD display (Liquid Crystal Display) is a flat panel display that uses the light modulating properties of liquid crystals. Since liquid crystals do not emit light, this type of display needs a backlight, or external light to produce an image. That’s why the power consumption of these displays is relatively high for battery powered Arduino projects.

On the other hand, the price of the LCDs is very low. The Nokia 5110, the 1.8″ Color TFT display and the 3.5″ Color TFT display, are all displays that use the LCD technology.

An OLED display is a screen that uses organic light emitting diodes. It requires no backlight, so the power consumption of these display is low and depends on how many pixels are lit. Also, since the screen does not need a backlight, it can display deep black color. Another advantage of this kind of display is that they are usually thinner and lighter the LCD displays. In low light, OLED displays can achieve better contrast in comparison to LCDs.

On the other hand, OLED displays are more expensive than LCD displays. Because of this, the available OLED displays for Arduino are tiny in size, and until recently they were only monochrome. A few months ago a small Color OLED appeared at a relatively low cost.

E-Paper of Electronic paper are displays that unlike traditional LCD or OLED displays does not emit light but reflect light. It is like the ink on the paper. This characteristic makes e-paper displays very comfortable to read, and they have an excellent readability under direct sunlight. Another great thing about e-paper displays is that they can hold static text and image for months without electricity! Yes, that’s correct, the display can show text and image even if it is off! That makes e-paper displays ideal for low powered projects!

Unfortunately there some disadvantages as well. The price of e-paper display is still very high. For example, this 4.3″ E-Paper display for Arduino costs over $60. Another significant disadvantage is that e-paper displays take a lot of time to update, as much as 2-3 seconds. So, they are only helpful for static text and images and not animations.

The Nokia 5110 is a basic graphic LCD screen which was originally intended for as a cell phone screen. It uses the PCD8544 controller which is a low power CMOS LCD controller/driver. Because of this, this display has an impressive power consumption. It uses only 0.4mA when it is on, but the backlight is disabled. It uses less than 0.06mA when in sleep mode! That’s one of the reasons that make this display my favorite. The PCD8544 interfaces to microcontrollers through a serial bus interface. That makes the display very easy to use with Arduino.

This impressive library is developed by Henning Karlsen who has put an enormous amount of effort to help the Arduino community move forward with his libraries. I have prepared a detailed tutorial on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display with Arduino. You watch it in this video:

Furthermore, it is also straightforward to use with Arduino since there is a library for it. It is the Adafruit SSD1331 library, and you find it here.

Also, despite the fact that this display is tiny, it is one of my favorites because it is ideal for handheld projects. Its power consumption is around 10-20 mA, and it depends on how many pixels are lit.

First of all the ST7735 Color TFT display is a very inexpensive display. It costs around $5, and it has a great library support. I have used it many of my projects, and I think it is great!

Furthermore, the display offers a resolution of 160×128 pixels, and it can display 65.000 colors. It uses the SPI interface to communicate with the Arduino boards. In addition to that, it works well with all the available Arduino boards, like the Arduino Uno, the Arduino Mega, and the Arduino Due. It also works fine with ESP8266 based boards, like the Wemos D1 and the Wemos D1 mini board.

Also, the power consumption of the board is around 50mA of current which is not bad in my opinion. We can easily use this board to build battery-powered projects that don’t need to be on all the time.

In conclusion, this is one of the best Arduino displays if you need color and low cost. I have prepared a detailed tutorial about the 1.8″ ST7735 Color TFT display, you can watch it here:

This is another very nice display to use with Arduino. It is an OLED display and that means that it has a low power consumption. The power consumption of this display is around 10-20 mA and it depends on how many pixels are lit.

In addition to that, the display uses the I2C interface, so the connection with Arduino is incredibly easy. You only need to connect two wires except for Vcc and GND. If you are new to Arduino and you want an inexpensive and easy to use display to use with your project, start with display. It is the easiest way to add a display to your Arduino project.

This 3.5″ Color TFT display is the biggest display that you can use in your project if you are using an Arduino Uno or a Mega. Unfortunately, it does not support the fast Arduino Due, nor the Wemos D1 ESP8266 board.

Also, the display comes as a shield. So, you only have to connect the display with your Arduino board, and you are ready to use it. Of course, you need to install the appropriate driver for the display. Luckily I have a link to this driver here. Search for the download file, and you will find the library for the display in that .zip file.

Hookup an LCD to an Arduino in 6 Seconds With 3, Not 6 Pins: Adding an LCD display to Arduino projects can add real value but the cost of doing so can be significant. Not a fina…

* The DFRobot LCD Shield uses pin 10 for the back light instead of pin 3:

In this article, let us see a list of Display Devices compatible with Arduino. These range from simple character displays to big graphical displays with touchscreen capabilities. Use this tutorial as a comparison of Arduino Display Devices which you can use in your DIY Project.

A Display is an output device used to present information in visual form. Using a Display device in your Arduino or any other DIY Project is definitely an advantage as you can easily view the data / information on the display instead of, say, the serial monitor.

There are several types of Display Devices available in the market that are compatible with Arduino with nice libraries. But choosing the right display for the project is an important task as you have to consider several aspects like price, size, resolution, ease-of-use, availability of libraries etc.

I collected a list of some of the commonly used Arduino compatible Display Devices. I also added links to tutorials for that particular display device using Arduino. Take a look at the list and I hope it helps in narrowing down the right display for your next Arduino Project.

Perhaps the most commonly used Display Device with Arduino is the 16×2 LCD. It is an alphanumeric character display which means that this LCD is capable of displaying only numbers and characters (and very few custom characters).

The numbers 16×2 represents the number of characters (16) per row and total number of rows (2). There is also a slightly bigger version of this display called the 20×4 LCD. As expected, it has 4 rows and 20 characters per row.

Usually, the 16×2 Character LCD (and its bigger brother the 20×4 LCD) come with a backlight. Blue and Green backlight colours are very common. Both the 16×2 LCD and 20×4 LCD come with 16 pins. The following table describes the pins of a 16×2 LCD.

8-bit or 4-bit Parallel Communication is the only way for Arduino to communicate with a 16×2 LCD. Since this interface takes up a lot of Arduino’s pins, PCF8574 based I2C add-on boards are developed for 16×2 LCD.

Using I2C based LCD reduces the required pins to just two (SCL an SDA of I2C). I made dedicated tutorial on “Interfacing 16×2 LCD with Arduino” and also on “How to Connect I2C LCD with Arduino”.

The next useful display device for Arduino is the monochrome OLED Display. OLED Displays have self-illuminating pixels i.e., each pixel is capable of producing its own light. So, there is no need for any backlight.

The advantage of OLED over traditional Character LCDs is that it is a Graphical Display, which means, it is very easy to display bitmap images and characters with different fonts.

Originally developed for use in Nokia Mobile Phones, the Nokia 5110 LCD is slowly becoming a popular choice for Arduino Projects. It has a resolution of 84×48 pixels and it is a Graphical LCD.

It is built around PCD8544 LCD Controller and uses SPI like Serial Communication Interface for data transfer. If you are interested in the pinout of Nokia 5110 LCD, then take a look at the following table.

For Backlight, there are several options like Red, Blue, Green and White. I made dedicated tutorial on “Interfacing Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino”. Check it out if you are interested.

Since the Nokia 5110 is a graphical LCD, it is very easy to design a Graphical User Interface for your application, like a Menu System. Do check the “How to Design an Arduino Nokia 5110 LCD Menu System?” tutorial.

The next useful display device in the list is the 128×64 Graphical LCD. As the name suggests, it has a resolution of 128×64 pixels, which is greater than a Nokia 5110 LCD. Also, the size of the LCD is big, with a lot of real estate to work with.

If you look at the pins of a typical 128×64 LCD, then it is very similar to a 16×2 LCD (but with couple extra pins). Essentially, the interface is also similar to that of a 16×2 LCD i.e., you can use a 4-bit or 8-bit parallel communication.

But the interesting thing is it can also be configured to work with an SPI like Serial Interface, there by significantly reducing the required Microcontroller pins without any external hardware.

It is very important to know the LCD Controller used in the LCD Device as there are many options available and you have to select the appropriate Controller in the code. Some of the common controllers are:

Hence, dedicated Display Driver ICs like MAX7219 are used to build modules around 8×8 LED Matrix so that Arduino (or other Microcontrollers) can communicate with MAX7219 through SPI.

It is very easy to cascade multiple such modules to increase the pixel count. Visit the “Arduino 8×8 LED Matrix” tutorial to find out more about 8×8 LED Matrix.

A Seven Segment Display or 7 Segment Display is another simple display device that you can use with Arduino. If your application requires displaying only numbers like Time or Quantity, then a 7 Segment Display is the cheapest and easiest option.

For more information on 7 Segment Displays, visit, “Arduino 7 Segment Display Interface” and for 4 – digit 7 – Segment Display, visit, “Arduino 4-Digit 7-Segment LED Display”.

The next two Arduino Display Devices are advanced modules (and even costly). If you want to create intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) between the system and the end user, then a colourful TFT LCD Display is your best option.

In normal TFT LCD Displays, you can only display the information. In order to interact with the system, you need additional hardware like a Rotary Encoder or Push Buttons. The TFT Touchscreen LCD Display solves this problem by integrating touchscreen on to the TFT Display.

NOTE: I did not implement any project using TFT LCD Display and TFT Touchscreen LCD Display. I will update the links for tutorial once I complete those projects.

This was a brief look at 8 of the most common Arduino Display Devices to integrate in your project. Interfacing a Display Device with Arduino will certainly give your project a new look and finish, whether it is a simple Alarm Clock, Weather Station or a complex Menu Interface.