nokia 5110 lcd module free sample

This post aims to be a complete guide for Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino. I’ll explain what it does, show its specs and share an Arduino project example that you can take and apply to your own projects.

The Nokia 5110 LCD is very popular among the Arduino tinkerers. These modules are used on wide variety of applications that require some sort of interface or display data to the user.

The Nokia 5110 LCD operates at 3.3V. So you can’t connect the Arduino Uno digital pins directly. Read this blog post to learn how you can level shift the signals from 5V to 3.3V.

The name Nokia 5110 (3310) comes from Nokia 5110 (or Nokia 3310) mobile phone. The Nokia 5110 LCD has a controller named PCD8544. This LCD is similar to the Nokia 5110 mobile phone LCD, it uses SPI interface protocol with maximum clock frequency of 4MHz, it requires 5 control pins (at most), it’s low cost and easy to use.

The resolution of this LCD is 84 x 48 which means it has 4032 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (it’s not 5V tolerant), this means interfacing it with 5V microcontroller such as PIC18F46K22 MCU may require voltage level shifter.

This module has 8 pins (from left to right): RST (reset), CE (chip enable), DC (or D/C: data/command), Din (data in), Clk (clock), VCC (3.3V), BL (back light) and Gnd (ground).

The Nokia 5110 which is shown in the circuit diagram has 8 pins (from left to right): RST (reset), CE (chip enable), DC (or D/C: data/command), Din (data in), Clk (clock), VCC (3.3V), BL (back light) and Gnd (ground).

The Nokia 5110 LCD works with 3.3V only (power supply and control lines). The LCD module is supplied with 3.3V which comes from the AMS1117 3V3 voltage regulator, this regulator converts the 5V into 3.3V (supplies the LCD controller PCD8544 with regulated 3V3).

To connect the PIC18F46K22 to the LCD module, I used voltage divider for each line. That means there are 5 voltage dividers. Each voltage divider consists of 2.2k and 3.3k resistors, this drops the 5V into 3V which is sufficient.

The default connection setting of the Nokia 5110 LCD (PCD8544) library is hardware SPI1 module (SPI1_Init(); must be called before initiating the LCD). Instead of hardware SPI1 module, software SPI or hardware SPI2 module can be used.

The name Nokia 5110 (3310) comes from Nokia 5110 (or Nokia 3310) mobile phone. The Nokia 5110 LCD has a controller named PCD8544, it is similar to the Nokia 5110 mobile phone LCD, it uses SPI interface protocol and requires 5 control pins (or 4 pins), it’s low cost and easy to use. The resolution of this LCD is 84 x 48 which means it has 4032 pixels. This module works with 3.3V only and it doesn’t support 5V (it’s not 5V tolerant).

The Nokia 5110 LCD which is shown in the circuit diagram has 8 pins (from left to right): RST (reset), CE (chip enable), DC (or D/C: data/command), Din (data in), Clk (clock), VCC (3.3V), BL (back light) and Gnd (ground).

The Arduino code below is the Adafruit test example for the Nokia 5110 LCD (comes with Adafruit Nokia 5110 LCD driver) with some modifications in order to work with the circuit schematic shown above.

In this project, I will show you how to interface a Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino UNO. First, we will see a little bit about the famous Nokia 5110 LCD Module and its LCD Controller PCD8544 from Phillips. Then we will see the steps for Interfacing Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino UNO board and display some basic text.

In previous Arduino projects, I have interfaced 16×2 LCD Module with Arduino (and other Microcontrollers as well). It is a simple character display module which is good enough for displaying simple alpha – numeric characters.

But if you want to display some custom characters or change the font size of the characters or even display some small graphical images, then you have to look elsewhere (a Graphical LCD to be precise).

The Nokia 5110 LCD Module is one such Graphical LCD Screen, which is now gaining a widespread following among electronic hobbyists and DIY Project builders. The Nokia 5110 LCD is originally developed for use in, well, as you might have guessed, Nokia Cell Phones (originally used in Nokia 5110 Mobile Phone. Hence, the name).

In fact, the iconic Nokia 3310 mobile phone consists of the same LCD screen. As a result, the LCD screen is known as either Nokia 3310 LCD or Nokia 5110 LCD.

The Nokia 5110 LCD is a Monochrome Graphical LCD with a resolution of 84 x 48 Pixels i.e., it contains 48 Rows and 84 Columns. You can control individual pixel on the screen and hence, this LCD Module is suitable for displaying text, graphics and bitmaps.

Coming to the data transfer, a serial interface is used to communicate with the LCD Module and this interface is similar to an SPI interface. The following table shows the Pinout of the Nokia 5110 LCD Module along with pin description.

My Nokia 5110 LCD has a blue backlight. But the module also has some other backlight colours like Red, White and Green. To provide the backlight, the LCD Module has four LEDs on the vertical edges (two LEDs on each edge). There is a dedicated backlight ON / OFF pin.

Behind the wonderful Nokia 5110 LCD, there lies the PCD8544 LCD Controller from Phillips. It is a single chip solution for driving a display of 48 rows and 84 columns.

Now that we have seen a little bit about the Nokia 5110 LCD Module and PCD8544 Controller, let us proceed with interfacing one with Arduino. The first point to consider is the LCD module is at a logic level of 3.3V while Arduino is at 5V.

The first and the easy way is to connect some current limiting resistors between Arduino and Nokia 5110. We need few 10KΩ resistors, a 1KΩ resistor and a 220Ω resistor (for backlight).

The next option is to use 3.3V to 5V logic level converter modules. Simple transistor based bi-directional logic level converters can be used. You need two such boards as each board consists of only four level conversion channels but we need five connections (RST, CE, DC, DIN and CLK).

If you do not have logic level converters, then you can use the above implementation. But I highly suggest you to get a couple of logic level converter modules. The following image shows the circuit diagram for Interfacing Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino UNO using Logic Level Converter.

The interface between Arduino and Nokia 5110 LCD Module can be implemented through Arduino’s hardware SPI or a software SPI. In this project, I have used the software SPI interface.

Before writing the code, there are a couple of libraries you need to download in order to successfully interface the Nokia 5110 LCD module with Arduino. In the Arduino IDE, go to Tools -> Manage Libraries… option. Search for “PCD8544 Nokia”.

Select the “Adafruit PCD8544 Nokia 5110 LCD Library” and click on install. After successful installation, search for “Adafruit GFX” and install the “Adafruit GFX Library”. This is an additional library and it helps in displaying graphics on the LCD.

The working of the project is very simple. We have to include the PCD8544 as well as the GFX header file in our code. First, declare an object the LCD and initialize it with the pins associated with software SPI.

A simple project for interfacing Nokia 5110 LCD with Arduino is implemented here. Since this just an introduction project, I have displayed a simple text on the LCD. But you can easily extend this basic functionality to display bitmap images, menu interface, etc.

This tutorial on "How to use a NOKIA 5110 LCD screen" is different from the all the tutorial that are available online because I"m not going to use any library in this tutorial(No worries!! it"s pretty easy,which i figured out after trying without libraries). I"m not using any libraries just because it makes it easy to understand how the LCD screen works. I mean what block of code(or a command, u"ll know in the upcoming steps) does. It makes it easy to control the graphics on the LCD screen. I"m going to write another tutorial after this tutorial on how to play "SNAKE GAME" using this NOKIA 5110 LCD screen.

The NOKIA 5110 LCD screen has a resolution of 84x48(or 48x84, however you read it) i.e. the screen has pixels arranged in 84 rows and 48 columns making a total of 4032 pixels (84*48=4032). So, since a NOKIA 5110 LCD screen is called a "Graphical LCD screen", one has access to all the pixels, i mean, access to control each and every pixel individually(you know what I mean) unlike some of the LCD screens which are named as "Alphanumeric LCD Displays" where one can access a block of pixels, generally 7x5 and place only a single alphabet or a number in that block of 7x5. If you have already worked with some alphanumeric LCD screens earlier(without any libraries), you are half-way done. In case, you haven"t worked with one earlier, no probs. I"ll let you know every possible detail I know.

So, as said earlier, the above image shows the arrangement of pixels in 48 rows and 84 columns( or vice-versa). Just like how each block in a alphanumeric LCD screens is addressed by a unique 8-bit code, every 8 pixels in the NOKIA 5110 LCD screen are assigned with a unique 8-bit address. So, let me explain about this 8 pixels grouping in the NOKIA 5110 LCD screen. Every 8 pixels vertically is grouped, as shown above and let"s call it a block(different from the alphanumeric LCD screen"s block). So, each block has a unique address to access it.

Some NOKIA 5110 LCD screens operate at 3.3V as Vcc while some can work with both 5V and 3.3V. Mine is a 5V version which works even when plugged to 3.3V.

NOKIA 5110 LCD screen uses SPI protocol as one can find a DIN pin which can also be call as MOSI(Master-Out Slave-In). So, all we gonna do is just pass commands with a couple of 8-bit data through the DIN pin while using the other pins(like DC, CE and CLK pins) simultaneously and appropriately.

This is the total code which displays two rectangular boxes on the LCD screen as shown below. If you are having trouble getting the output, feel free to ping me or comment down below.

This line means that when ever i type "LCD_CE" anywhere in my code, it gets replace with "7", which is the pin of arduino to which I"ve connected the CE pin of LCD screen. And similarly, all the other pins. I"ve also declared LCD_C and LCD_D which I"ll explain in the upcoming steps.

The elements in this array are the one which decide the graphics that are displayed on the LCD screen. As I"ve said earlier, every 8 bits on the LCD screen are grouped together, every element in this array are 8-bit(2-digits in hexadecimal). Suppose, let us consider the first element of the element as 0xF0. 0xF0 in hexadecimal is equivalent to 0b11110000 in binary. So, when the 0xF0 is sent to the LCD screen(i"ll discuss about it in the next step), the first four pixels in the first group of 8-vertically grouped pixels(as discussed in STEP-1) are made dark(black) as the first four bits in the input data are "1" and similarly, the remaining 4-bits are not darkened as they are "0".

As I said earlier, the NOKIA 5110 LCD screen can be communicated with SPI or through the MOSI pin i.e. DIN pin on the LCD screen. So, we need to send 8-bit commands or data to work with the display. The commands are so simple. One need not prefer to remember them if you can refer to datasheet of NOKIA 5110 LCD screen when ever needed. I"ve included a page of the data sheet in the next step.

So, as mentioned in the datasheet, before sending the data or command to the LCD screen, we need to make the CE(chip enable) pin low and make it high again after sending the command.(Basically, CE pin is an active low pin. So, make it low to use the LCD screen). also, we need to make the DC(data/command) pin low for command and high for data.

The LCD_Write command takes in two parameters, 1. Data/Command and 2. 8-bit data. Depending on the Data/Command, the DC pin is made low or high for command or data respectively. shiftOut() is a function available in SPI.h but is also included by default and so we need not include the SPI.h library seperately.

First, setting up the CE, RESET, DC, DIN, CLK as outputs, we continue to reset the LCD screen just to make sure all the garbage values in the pixels are cleared. Next we send some commands, which set-up the LCD screen. You can have a look at all the commands in the data sheet.

After initialization, ofcouse, we need to execute this LCD_Initialise() function in the setup() function of the arduino. Also need to setup serial communication using Serial.begin(9600) where 9600 is the baud rate. After that, we are ready to go to display the graphics on LCD screen.void LCD_Initialise(void){

So, we know how to initialize the LCD screen, we know how to communicate with the LCD screen, we know how the LCD screen works, but we don"t know how to display the graphics of our owe choice. To do that, we need to know how to convert any image into bitmap. The image must be in "BLACK AND WHITE", if not conver it into B&W using some software.

Generally, I use GIMP and LCDAssistant(and paint.net) softwares. Again, try getting Google"s help in knowing how to use GIMP to convert a B&W image to Gray scale and I"m going to tell you about LCD Assistant and paint.net.

This software is used to draw any image which you want to display on the LCD screen. Sounds cool, isn"t it?? For example, you can display your name in your handwriting or some cool stuff. Again, go to Google and find a video which can help you with until I post a video.

Now, you are ready to use a NOKIA 5110 LCD screen.Do comment bellow if you have any doubts.Do comment bellow if I"ve gone wrong somewhere.Do comment bellow your experience, if you have done one.

I"m working on the LCD screen. I"m already working on some games that can be played with this LCD screen. Will surely try to do it and put it up here.

In one of our previous tutorials we did an introduction on how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD  with the Arduino, the tutorial covered displaying texts with different fonts etc. For this tutorial, we are taking things a little bit further and will be working through the display of customized graphics on the Nokia 5110 LCD display. This tutorial will particularly be useful for those who want to display their brand logo or any other kind of image on the LCD asides ordinary texts.

The Nokia 5110 display is basically a graphic LCD display useful for a lot of applications. It was intended originally to be used as a screen for cell phones and was used in lots of mobile phones during the 90’s. This display uses a low powered CMOS LCD controller/driver PCD8544, which drives the graphic display of size 84×48. In a normal state, the display consumes about 6 to 7mA which makes it quite ideal for low power usage.

There are two main power sources needed. The first one is the operational power supply which according to the data sheet should be between the range of 2.7V to 3.3V.  The second power supply is required for the LCD back-light. The LCD circuit has no current limiting resistor inbuilt so its better to play safe and only power with 3.3V max.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using the paint.net tool to create the graphics. It is easy to use and can be downloaded from here. One thing that should be kept in mind while creating the graphics or logo is the canvass size. Since the LCD is 84×48, its important the canvass size is same as the screen, to ensure the designed graphics shows perfectly on the display.

In order to load our own graphics into the Arduino to be displayed by the Nokia 5110 display, we will need to use the LCD assistant software.  It is a free and easy to use software that converts bitmap images into a data array which can then be used in C programming language based firmware for any micro-controller. The software is available for download here.

With the LCD initialized, we then move to the loop proper. For each of the graphics to be displayed, we first clear the screen using lcd.clrscr() and then draw the graphics using lcd.drawbitmap() with the coordinates, name of the file, and the size as parameters. update the display with lcd.update() and set a delay to give the graphics enough time to display on the screen.

I had a project that needed some live data display, and looking for the cheapest low-power solution for our loggers lead me to the Nokia 5110 LCD. Once you get the backlight current under control, you can power the entire display from a digital pin, and if you use shiftout for soft SPI you can then get rid of the Reset and CS control lines. This brings the display down to any four wires you can spare on your build (incl. the power pin) and a ground line. This is much more manageable than what you see with the standard hookup guides if your mc is I/O limited like our pro-mini based loggers:

This LCD (I have the old-old kind) is absolutely my favorite. Yes, it has a board-to-glass connector that ranges from bad to abysmal, but it offers such a simple interface and so many pixels for so little money (obviously less if you buy only the panel.) Here are some clever things I"ve discovered:

Will fully operate on as little as 2.0V. That"s power (Vdd) and i/o. It can be driven at 2MHz at these speeds; in fact, the LCD will work at even lower voltages but the contrast fades quickly and your microcontroller will likely approach its lower voltage limit too.

The LCD will work with the chip-select pin (SCE) tied to ground. This means that if it"s the only device on the SPI bus, don"t bother framing the i/o with a chip-select pin. If the bus is shared, frame the entire transaction, not every individual byte you send to the LCD. Interestingly, the display also seems to work fine with a floating Vdd pin - it must draw sufficient power just from i/o via clamping diodes; not surprising when you consider how low-power it is.

The Vout pin: Looks like you don"t have to worry about it on this product, but the bare LCD will generate positive 6-9V on that pin. This wasn"t totally clear to me from reading the datasheet.

(5) If you are using a PIC to run ths thing, and using the PIC"s USART or EUSART in a synchronous mode, be sure to note that the LCD controller expects the MSBit of each byte to be transmitted first on the serial line. The PIC 18F EUSART transmits the LSBit first. For now, I have lots of extra code space, so I"ve wasted a 256-byte section on a lookup table that reverses the bits in a byte. This way, I just write my initialization code normally, and I have a TransmitCommandByte() function that looks up every byte it sends so I don"t have to think about that.

Thank you! I"m not quite sure I do want an LCD yet, to be honest, I"m just considering the different options available. I"ll check out the Sharp component, thanks!

Advice for others: It took me quite a while to get this working on an ARM Cortex. Since there is no way to read from the LCD, it is very hard to know if SPI is working without doing everything perfectly. SO:

If the LCD module is soldered to another board and the two top screws installed and tightened carefully to pull the bow out of the module it seems to prevent (or solve) the problem.

I"m using voltage dividers to supply 3V in the inputs of the LCD, because of the Arduino works in 5V. LCD Vcc and LED are powered from the 3.3V output of the Arduino. The LCD only displayed something when I used: R1=470K,R2=820K. I have tried several values to obtain 3V, but the LCD showed nothing. I don"t understand that.

I"m interfacing this LCD with ATMEGA 32. Its been more than a week that I"ve been trying to get it right. All I get is the LED dimming effect. Here is my initialization code..CE=1;

I have a similar board made by mib-instruments and bought from ebay years ago. It has been my standard spi test tool because it"s so easy to work with. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nokia-5110-LCD-84x84-dot-martix-backlight-PCB-RED-/320684678723 (specs http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k636/mib_instruments/diy/LCDC2A0SPEC.jpg)

I almost have it working satisfactorily but I find that the bottom 1/5th of the screen does not function correctly. Sometimes it has some random blocks that are black, most of the time it is blank. I am not sure what would cause this. Is it safe to assume it is a defect on this module?

These LCD"s need cleaning. I have an average failure rate of about 15-20% on delivery. The most common problem is that the contrast is too high, and there"s constant flickering / changing of contrast compared to the other 80% of them.

The solution is fairly simple, unclip the LCD from it"s board and clean the pads on the PCB with 99% IPA. Then remove the lcd back plate and contact bar. Sometimes the contact bar is stuck fairly well to the glass, peel off carefully. Clean the contacts on the LCD glass with IPA, if any residue from the contacts is left on, rub it off carefully with IPA / tissue.

I love this little display! I wanted to be able to create images for it but nothing I saw did exactly what I wanted. So I wrote a processing sketch that creates 84x48 squares on the screen and allows you to click to turn them on or off. Also has buttons to invert, move up/down/left/right, and flip horizontally/vertically. Then, it saves the hex data to a text file to copy to your code. You can also load an image (any size, any colors) and it will scale it, convert to b/w, then put it in the rest of the program so that you can alter the pixels or move it. It isn"t perfect for every occasion but I"ve found it useful and I hope others might too. It is heavily commented so it should be easy to figure things out and change them if you want something different. http://thewanderingengineer.com/2014/07/12/nokia-5110-screen-photo-to-bitmap-converter/

Anyone taken these things apart yet? You know the flexible rectangular blocky thing that connects the contact pad on the board to the LCD itself? What are these called?

Got mine running last night and found two problems with the code, one of which was the backslash a couple of others have already noted. Second was that the LCDCharacter() writes two blank vertical lines, one before the character and a second after, when only one is needed. Without the extra blank you get at least one additional character on each line. I"ll probably also move the ASCII font table to PROGMEM space to save on RAM and then start to work on some big digits for a clock.

I"m using this LCD for a large Arduino UNO project, but I"m running out of SRAM memory space. I was wondering if I used PROGMEM on the LCD ASCII array if that would help. If so, does anyone know what the right code for this would be? After looking through a lot of PROGMEM examples, I"m not advance enough to really grasp everything that"s going on. Any help you can give would be a great help. Thanks in advance!

I used one of these LCDs with an Arduino to display GPS information. I wrote a few functions that can display large numbers (28 px high) if anyone is interested, this lets me display speed, heading etc. A writeup of my project is here: http://mechinations.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/gps-sailing/

These are great displays. I ran into a problem using them with the nRF24L01+ radio transciever, which requires the use of the SPI bus. If one attaches both the radio and the display MOSI and SCK pins to pins 13 and 11 as instructed in the hookup guide, the SPI traffic of the other device (in this case the nRF24L01+ radio) will prevent the display from functioning. The easy solution is to move the Nokia 5110 MOSI and SCK pins to any other digital pin. This should be made clear in the hookup guide, where it says there is no choice but to use the hardware SPI pins for the display. I found out that is not true at all. I hope his helps others with the same problem. Despite the occasional bad display these carry much more information that the comparably prices 16 x 2 LCD and use fewer pins too boot. What a deal!

This is a great display for the money, certainly the best bang for the buck of you can live with B&W and lower res graphics. I have a lcd driver for Arduino I will post on http://www.marchdvd.com/5110 so take a look there it draws text aligned on pixels boundaries of 8 and draws lines and has invert video options.

I just started messing around with this LCD using a STM32F103 microcontroller running at 72MHz... it works great. The only problem I had, and I suspect others might have if they are using fast processors, is that you have to deliberately introduce the setup and hold time delays on the DC pin... if you don"t you will get spurious pixels written to the display. I used a delay of 10uS, although the spec says 100nS is fine.

I just spent the last couple hours struggling with this LCD because of something very stupid of me. I was using an atmega328p in AVR-GCC and using hardware SPI. Thinking i didn"t need MISO I hooked it to DC. The LCD worked absolutely fine until I tried to set the x and y position in the ram. It started acting weird every time I tried it. Finally I put dc to another pin and BAM NO PROBLEMS. Looking back I feel pretty stupid but hopefully this post will save someone else the same mistake. Other than that great LCD for my projects

The Energia folks have an example program for this LCD and the TI Launchpad written using their Arduino style tooling. I"ve updated their example and added the ability to report back the temperature over a UART. It is a very simple hardware setup since both systems are 3.3v. http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2012/08/digital-thermometer-with-ti-lanchpad.html

I tried using the "LCDAssistant" package to create a logo from a graphic that I resized to a b&w jpg of 84x48 but every byte generated was 0x00 so that was not right. I tried fiddling with the settings (flying blind) but still got nowhere - does anybody know the settings for LCDAssistant and this display and has used it successfully?

One of the things that I test regularly is a commercial item that features a 16x4 (HD44780) display. Currently I have a 20x4 on a flying lead that I plug in to determine if a display failure is down the lcd display or the main board.

Is there any way to get the 5110 Graphic Display to work with signals that were feeding to an HD44780? - if I could build that in then I would have a complete multi-testing set up in one box.

Might I suggest you (SFE) source some of the Electronic Assembly"s LCD Dog-S series. I think they would be a step up from these at a reduced price. I don"t think that they website is up to date, but their part number is LED39x41-GR.

I made a little font generator for the Nokia 5110 in the processing programming language (processing.org). It allows you to convert any font and any character that you can display on the screen into a list of hex codes that can be directly used in an embedded system (I"m using msp430). Just type a character and the corresponding hex codes will be in your clipboard and you can copy them into your program. It starts with an example with the chinese character for 5. It should work on any system that can run processing (e.g. mac osx).

I finally got around to running this LCD on my 3310 PCB. It is working fine with one minor problem. The SF 3310 display hides to first line of bytes for some reason and I had to offset everything to compensate. The 5110 doesn"t do this as behaves as expected. I haven"t heard anyone else report this so maybe my initialization code is different.

Using a 3V source, my LCD often worked OK using bias 0x14 like the other examples, but sometimes it would appear gray and faded. The fading would lessen if I touched the panel lightly with my hand for a few seconds, then let go, so maybe it"s a temperature-dependent thing?

Ack! After two days of working nicely with 0x15 bias, I reset the board today, and the LCD appeared way over-dark. I changed the bias back to 0x14 and it looks perfect. What the heck?! I think there must be some temperature-sensing or temperature-dependence going on, so the same init values may produce good-looking results one day but not the next.

If you are having problems with the black pixels in images/warping PCB, use original Nokia 5110, I happened to have one at home and it works as it should, no bad connections degrading image quality.

Does anyone know whether this can be stripped of its backing so it can be used in transmission? I would love to use this as a modulator for a laser beam. Or if someone knows a similarly cheap transmission LCD that would be fine too.

Stuck. Blank LCD. Added 0x20, changed Vop to 0xB3. Guessing connections may be the issue? 3.3v for LED and VCC. GND to GND. Remainder connected to Arduino via voltage dividers. What am I doing wrong?

This is a great little lcd. When I first wired it up, the backlight was shorted (accidentally) against my 5v rail, so i got some magic smoke, and burnt to LEDs but it re-soldered the offending joints and it works very well now. Something to note: the refresh and write times are much, much slower if you use 5 volt logic. I stuck in a logic level converter and it ran at least 5x faster.

You can also use FastLCD to convert your bitmaps - google it. It outputs BASIC code, but you just search and replace &h to 0x and you"re grand. It has the added advantage of being an editor for touching up output.

I recently obtained a virtually identical LCD from a Nokia 5160, and although its backlight LEDs are green, not white and conversely use different voltages, I had success hooking up the LEDs" Vcc pin to a PWM capable pin on the microcontroller, allowing me to control backlight intensity (I didn"t need a current limiting resistor for this either, but adding one will help reduce current drain on the controller).

Seems like the PCD8544 library does it"s own SPI bit managing and it really doesn"t like me using the SD library (also talks SPI) at the same time. I"ve made sure I"ve got all the SPI pins matching for both libraries (MISO, MOSI, Clock are the same and each device has it"s own Select), but it looks like the SD.begin() call just breaks the SPI bus for the 5110 and it becomes non-responsive. The LCD works just fine if I don"t initialize the SD library and the SD card works fine if I do initialize the SD card.

I"m pretty sure I tracked down the problem- the PCD8544 library uses software SPI while the SD library uses hardware SPI and I"m pretty sure the Arduino can"t do both over the same SPI clock/miso/mosi pins. Anyone know if this LCD will work with hardware SPI?

I"ve had issues with the LCD not showing anything intermittently. You got to make sure that all the connections are secure, and for the reset pulse, be sure to have a delay that"s 30-50 milliseconds long.

As much as I love SFE products and will continue to order from them, this is one product I would not recommend. The connection between the LCD unit itself and the carrier board is via those rubber polymer connectors. All the planets must line up properly for them to work. In this case, the carrier board was warped preventing the connection from working. You will find other such remarks in the comments area.

Don"t do this. Each divider will be burning 20x the entire amount of current that the display needs to function, and the whole assembly will waste 100x the LCD"s needed power and many, many times more than even the atmega needs to run at full speed. This will kill battery life.

Hi, I just bought this wonderful LCD but I"m having huge huge problems connecting it..could anyone please point me in the right direction? Since there are pins that aren"t metioned in the code, for example the 6 - DNK(MOSI)...

Does anyone know the diode rating and package size, also does anyone know where to get the rubber ferroius connector behind the LCD mine is defective. Has anyone come into issues with the breadboard the LCD is connected to, a few aren"t working for me.

Yes, we have noticed that the PCB was bowing and as a result the LCD now only works when we press down on the metal strip at the top. I hope that only a small number of these LCDs have this problem. We"re expecting a shipment to arrive today, I will be running more tests.

Edit: After leaving glue to dry overnight, LCD simply does not turn on anymore. All the connections are good, but absolutely nothing shows on the LCD now at all. Only the LEDs come on.

Did you get either of the LCDs to display anything, at any time? Is it possible that the connections were OK, but you were not initializing or driving them correctly? Or did they start to work at one point, and then fail at some later point?

Note that the backlight LED"s are soldered onto the breakout board, and have nothing to do with the circuitry of the controller and LCD. So just because the backlights are shining doesn"t tell you anything about the operability of the LCD itself.

It depends on the code that you are using to control the LCD. If you are using the Arduino example above, the pins are defined in the beginning of the code.

FWIW I have connected this LCD with a 5V power supply to a 5V Arduino board with no level conversion and it worked. Presumably this may reduce the lifetime of the LCD.

I am attempting to use this with a Duemilanove (ATmega328). Up til now, I have been powering it with the 3.3V line, including the LED. The datasheet for the LDC claims: "VDDmax = 5 V if LCD supply voltage is internally generated (voltage generator enabled)." The logic levels should be kept from 2.7V to 3.3V. Since the Duemilanove uses 5V logic levels, I am using a simple voltage divider on the communication line with no issues.

The maximum logic value of 3.3 volts made me cautious of driving the LCDs at the native 5 volts of my Teensy AVR. That said, running purely off 5 volts seems to do no harm to the LCD.

For those interested, I have taken a few measurements of the current draw of the LED backlight of my LCD. As I said earlier, powering the LED with 5V external has caused permanent damage to one, perhaps two of the four LEDs. So, use the following graph at your own risk.

Is there any more documentation available for the additions to the LCD? For example, the datasheet has no information (that I could find, at least) on the LED. Everything seems fine on 3.3V, but what is the current limit on the LED? (note: if it wasn"t for work, I would just mess around with it myself.)

Here is a PicBasic Pro example for the 3310, which should be compatible with the 5110. http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/content.php?r=174-Using-Nokia-3310-LCD

Fantastic! It appears from your example link that this uses the same controller as the Nokia 3310 that I"ve already used in past projects. The only thing that made it so cumbersome was trying to connect to its fine pitch press on type connector. This gives me a great low cost display option that is easy to connect to.

If anyone doesn"t have experience with this LCD, take a peak at the Arduino example link above to see just how easy it is to use. If you use plain C on your AVRs, I have sample code on http://tinkerish.com.

Here I’ve added a the 5110 LCD to a logger recording data from a BME280 & Tipping Bucket Rain gauge. If the BME  survives in our field environment, this will become a standard configuration for our climate stations. I’m not holding my breath though, as we’ve tested half a dozen RH sensors so far and none of them have gone the distance in high humidity environments that occasionally go condensing.

This year I want to tackle some projects that need live data out, so I’ve been sifting through the many display options available for Arduino. Unlike flashier projects, my goal was to find one that I could add to existing logger builds without sacrificing too much of the multi-year lifespan I had worked so hard to achieve. The low power winner by a fair margin was the Nokia 5110 Liquid-crystal Display  which you can pick up for around $2 from the usual sources. With the back-light off these displays pull between 100-400 μA, depending on the number of pixels turned on.

This screen’s been around for a very long time, so there’s are a huge number of easy to use, highly functional libraries for Arduino. But they tend to focus on things like speed or endless font options which are not important for most data logging applications. And these libs assume your project can afford to lose up to ⅓ of the available program & variable memory just driving the display. Most also require the hardware SPI lines, but our project needs those for SD cards, which are finicky enough without some pokey LCD gumming up the works: the 5110 maxes out at 4mbps, and this slows the bus significantly .

To make this limited large-number font I first composed a black & white bitmap for each number with a graphic editor, and then loaded that .bmp file into the LCD assistant program as described in this instructables tutorial.  I started with a bitmap that was 11 pixels wide, by 16 pixels high (though you can use any arbitrary size you want – just remember to leave the blank spacer row at the bottom) and for this two-pass ‘sliced-letters’ method I set vertical & little endian encoding in LCD assistant. I then put the top 11 bytes in the Big11x16numberTops[] array & the lower 11 bytes for each number in the Big11x16numberBottoms[] array.

The stuff I posted on Github assumes you are using a standard 6-pin arrangement shown in most Nokia 5110 hookup guides you will find on the web. But once I had that wrangled, I realized that it would be possible to reduce the number pins needed to drive the display.  You will have to tweak that default example by commenting out the RS & CS commands if you implement the pin-power changes I’m suggesting here…

My tests so far have shown reliable operation of pin-powered 5110’s through more than 8000 ‘long-sleep’ power cycles. In applications where I want to display data on the screen on for long periods of time,  I still depower the screen during the new sensor readings. This lets me know when the logger is capturing data and forces a periodic re-synch with the bus. I don’t know how long these displays would run continuously without that step, but I’m sure the coms would eventually go AWOL without some kind of regular reset.

No screen is much use on our project unless it can withstand some bumping around in the real world, and ideally we want one that is dive-able. For several years my go-to solution has been to pot surface mounted LED’s and sensors in Loctite E30CL. I like this epoxy because the slow cure usually sets clear because bubbles have time to rise to the surface without a vacuum treatment. My first attempts looked great the night of the pour, but I got a nasty surprise the following morning. You see I usually mount sensors in small ½-1 inch wells, but the 5110 required a ring more than 2” in diameter. The contraction of the epoxy in this 10mm deep well caused pressure marks on the edges of the screen, and a significant brown spot in the center of the display where the text became inverted.

The next attempt was much more successful, as I built up the epoxy a few mm at a time like the layers of an onion. As each layer hardened, it protected the screen from the contraction of the subsequent layers above.  The trick was to bring the first pour to the base of the pcb, and the second pour to “just barely” cover the surface of the screen. The epoxy penetrates about 1/3 of the way into the display housing but this does not interfere with readability as those edges are invisible under natural lighting conditions. That epoxy is actually under the LCD, in the air gap between the transparent glass LCD sandwich and the white reflector plastic which holds the thin LCD in place between the metal rim and the PCB.  I’ll try future pours at different angles to see if that lets the space under the LCD fill completely. Looking at the epoxy penetration, it’s clear that the black edges in pour #1 were places where the LCD was compressed on both sides, and the brown discoloration was from pressure on top with no support below.

After several builds using the this LCD screen I finally got around to (not counting EEprom.h) And that’s with three copies of the output functions because of the simple 2-pass method I’m using to display the large numbers.  A small price to pay for live data output on our loggers!

I’m connecting the OLED with the same analog line connections used for the Nokia, but I’ve added a delayed-high RC bridge because the OLED is pickier about the reset input than the Nokias. In hindsight a similar method is probably a good idea for the Nokia screens as well, though you might need to experiment a bit with the resistor/cap values to get the timing right.

Remember the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had buttons and you only touched that tiny black and white screen if you needed to clean it? Nokia used these little LCDs in their 3310 and 5110 cell phones.

Thanks to the PCD8544 controller’s versatility, it includes on-chip generation of LCD supply and bias voltages which results in low power consumption making it suitable for power sensitive applications. In a normal state, the LCD consumes as low as 6 to 7mA only.

If you want to change the backlight of the LCD, just remove the LCD off the board by pushing the metal clips at the back side. When the screen comes off, you will notice the four LEDs soldered around the edges of the display. Just replace the LEDs with desired color LEDs.

There are many versions of these LCD displays that don’t come with any current limiting resistor. This means you have to be careful while connecting power supply to it. As a precautionary measure, you can place a 330Ω current limiting resistor in series with the ‘Backlight’ pin.

The PCD8544 LCD driver has a built-in 504 bytes Graphic Display Data RAM (GDDRAM) for the screen which holds the bit pattern to be displayed. This memory area is organized in 6 banks (from 0 to 5). Each bank contains 84 columns/segments (from 0 to 83). And each column can store 8 bits of data (from 0 to 7). That surely tells us we have

But unfortunately, the LCD has 3v communication levels, so we cannot directly connect these pins to the Arduino. We need some protection. This can be done by shifting levels.

The PCD8544 LCD controller has flexible yet complex drivers. Vast knowledge on memory addressing is required in order to use the PCD8544 controller. Fortunately, Adafruit’s PCD8544 Nokia 5110 LCD library was written to hide away all the complexities so that we can issue simple commands to control the display.

Filter your search by typing ‘nokia’. There should be a couple entries. Look for Adafruit PCD8544 Nokia 5110 LCD library. Click on that entry, and then select Install.

This will give you complete understanding about how to use the Nokia 5110 LCD display and can serve as the basis for more practical experiments and projects. Try the sketch out and then we will dissect it in some detail.

The sketch starts by including three libraries viz. SPI.h, Adafruit_GFX.h and Adafruit_PCD8544.h. Next, we need to create an LCD object. This object takes 5 parameters and specifies which Arduino pins are connected to the LCD’s CLK, Din, D/C, CE and RST pin. We also defined rotatetext variable which will make sense a little later.

In setup function: we need to initialize the LCD object using begin() function. We also need to set the contrast of the display using setContrast(value) function with value can be anywhere between 0-100. However, value between 50-60 gives great results.

In order for the library to perform extremely fast mathematical operations on the screen buffer (more than 100 frames per second), calls to the print functions do not immediately transfer the contents of screen buffer to the PCD8544 controller. A display() command is required to instruct the library to perform the bulk transfer from the screen buffer in the ATmega328P to the internal memory of the PCD8544 controller. As soon as the memory is being transferred, the pixels corresponding to the screen buffer will show up on the LCD display.

Numbers can be displayed on the LCD display by just calling print() or println() function. An overloaded implementation of these functions accepts 32-bit unsigned int, so you can only display numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295.

This last example shows how to draw bitmap images to the Nokia 5110 LCD Display. This is useful for creating splash screens of company logos, making sprites or just creating fun graphics for displaying information. Copy the following code, paste it into the Arduino IDE and click upload.

To show bitmap image on the Nokia 5110 LCD display we need to call drawBitmap() function. It takes six parameters viz. Top left corner X coordinate, top left corner Y coordinate, byte array of monochrome bitmap, width of bitmap in pixels, height of bitmap in pixels and Color.

But, before we can call the drawBitmap() function, we first need an image to draw. Remember, the screen resolution of Nokia 5110 LCD display is 84×48 pixels, so images larger than that will not display correctly. To get a correctly sized image, you can use your favorite drawing programs like Inkscape, Photoshop, Paint, etc., setting the canvas size to 84×48 pixels.

Once you have a bitmap, it’s time to convert it into an array that the PCD8544 controller can understand. This can be done using two ways: Online method using image2cpp and Offline method using LCD Assistant.

There’s an online application called image2cpp – http://javl.github.io/image2cpp/ which can convert your image into an array. Image2cpp is newer and much more powerful than LCD Assistant (later solution). It will allow you to:

There’s another application called LCD assistant – http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/which can convert your bitmap image into data array. It’s not as powerful as image2cpp but still popular among hobbyists.

We have received a number of requests for examples on how to use our Nokia 5110 with Arduino - so here it goes. For this tip we used a Arduino Nano, but any Arduino can be used.

Use our Nokia 5110 displays - which feature a PCD8544 CMOS LCD controller/driver - with an Arduino (compatible) development board and the Arduino IDE.

The pin connections are guaranteed to work with our Nokia 5110 displays. Other similar displays might have a different pin layout and you will need to adapt to your specific module.

We will be using Gavin Lyons" "Nokia 5110 Text" Library which is available through the Arduino IDE Library Manager. There are other options, this one is the easiest (we found).

The 5110, also known as Nokia 5146 on One2One (now T-Mobile), or the nk402 on Orange in the UK, was intended for the consumer market, succeeding Nokia 3110 and the analogue Nokia 232. Its design is based on the same platform as Nokia 6110 for the business market. It features a similar, simpler, revamped user interface called Series 20,infrared data interface. It can, however, be interfaced with a computer via a cellular data card and a proprietary cable, enabling it to function like a modem to connect to remote computer systems through the Public switched telephone network (PSTN).

It is the first Nokia phone to come with replaceable faceplates, which Nokia branded "Xpress-on" covers; a concept Nokia incorporated into several other consumer-oriented cellphones aimed at the young adult market for years to come, allowing users to customize their device.trademarked in the U.S. on 25 February 1998.

In the Asia Pacific region, Nokia launched a successor to the 5110, the 5110i. The 5110i has longer talk and standby times, and had a more ergonomic, redesigned, silicone keypad.

While the Nokia 5110 operates only on 900MHz GSM networks, the 5130 operates on 1800MHz GSM networks instead. It was marketed by Orange UK as the nk402.

The North American variant of this handset is Nokia 5190, which is a 1900 MHz-only GSM handset. Nokia 5125 is the North American version of the 5110i.

Nokia 5160/Nokia 5165 with TDMA/IS-136 service on 800 MHz and 1900 MHz and analog AMPS service at 800 MHz is the same handset form. Nokia 5120/5125 is a TDMA/IS-136 handset that operates on 800 MHz, and also on AMPS at 800 MHz.

My question is in the title, how to refresh a certain part of the NOKIA 5110 screen ? For example, how to display and refresh the datetime every 1 second without deleting all other text/lines ? It"s is possible, or it is not possible because it is how the screen work (need erasing all block before writing same as EEPROM default writing for example) ?