lcd display raspberry pi pico brands

We"ve sourced a new LCD screen especially for our Pico Display Pack - it"s a lovely, bright 18-bit capable 240x135 pixel IPS display and fits the Pico perfectly. We"ve surrounded it with four tactile buttons so you can easily interface your Pico with your human fingers and an RGB LED that you can use as an indicator, for notifications or just for adding extra rainbows.

Pico Display lets you turn a Pico into a compact user interface device for a bigger project, capable of giving instructions, displaying readouts and even incorporating elaborate nested menus. If you"d rather use your Pico as a standalone device you could make a little rotating slideshow of images, display beautiful graphs from sensor data or build your own Tamagotchi or matchbox sized text adventure game.

The labels on the underside of Pico Display will show you which way round to plug it into your Pico - just match up the USB port with the markings on the board.

The easiest way to get started is by downloading and copying our custom MicroPython uf2 to your Pico, it includes all the libraries you"ll need to use our add-ons. The beginner friendly tutorial linked below will show you how to get to grips with pirate-brand MicroPython.

Pico Display also works very nicely with CircuitPython and Adafruit"s DisplayIO library - look for the Display Pack ST7789 example in the library bundle to get started!

Pico Display Pack communicates with the LCD display via SPI on pins LCD_CS, LCD_DC, LCD_SCLK, and LCD_MOSI. We also PWM the BL_EN pin (with gamma correction) for full, linear, backlight control. LCD_RESET is tied to the RUN pin on Pico so the LCD will be fully reset whenever Pico is.

There is also an onboard RGB LED (ideal to use an activity indicator!) which is also PWMed (with gamma correction) on pins LED_R, LED_G, and LED_B. If you want to use the LED pins for something else there are three cuttable traces on the underside of the board.

Power is supplied through 3V3 meaning that you can use Pico Display Pack both on USB power and from external supplies (from 1.8V to 5.5V) making it ideal for battery powered projects.

Raspberry Pi Pico is a flexible, low cost microcontroller development board from the folks at Raspberry Pi, based on their very own chip - the RP2040. It"s easily programmable over USB with C/C++ or MicroPython, and ideal for using in all sorts of physical computing projects, devices and inventions - we"re so excited to see what you make with it!

We"ve called our Pico-sized add-ons packs, as they"re designed to attach to the back of your Pico as if it were wearing a very stylish back pack (or a miniature jet pack, if you prefer). We"ve also got Pico bases (larger add-on boards with a space to mount your Pico on top) and some other boards that let you do interesting hackerly things like using multiple packs at once - click here to view them all!

We"ve sourced a new LCD screen especially for our Pico Display Pack - it"s a lovely, bright 18-bit capable 240x135 pixel IPS display and fits the Pico perfectly. We"ve surrounded it with four tactile buttons so you can easily interface your Pico with your human fingers and an RGB LED that you can use as an indicator, for notifications or just for adding extra rainbows.

Pico Display lets you turn a Pico into a compact user interface device for a bigger project, capable of giving instructions, displaying readouts and even incorporating elaborate nested menus. If you"d rather use your Pico as a standalone device you could make a little rotating slideshow of images, display beautiful graphs from sensor data or build your own Tamagotchi or matchbox sized text adventure game.

The labels on the underside of Pico Display will show you which way round to plug it into your Pico - just match up the USB port with the markings on the board.

The most straightforward way of getting started with our Pico add-ons is by downloading and copying our custom MicroPython firmware to your Pico. You can find the latest release as well as code examples for MicroPython and C/C++ here.

Pico Display Pack communicate with the LCD display via SPI on pins LCD_CS, LCD_DC, LCD_SCLK, and LCD_MOSI. We also PWM the BL_EN pin (with gamma correction) for full, linear, backlight control. LCD_RESET is tied to the RUN pin on Pico so the LCD will be fully reset whenever Pico is.

There is also an onboard RGB LED (ideal to use an activity indicator!) which is also PWMed (with gamma correction) on pins LED_R, LED_G, and LED_B. If you want to use the LED pins for something else there are three cuttable traces on the underside of the board.

Power is supplied through 3V3 meaning that you can use Pico Scroll Pack both on USB power and from external supplies (from 1.8V to 5.5V) making it ideal for battery powered projects.

If you want to free up the pins that the LED uses for other purposes we"ve made it easy to cut the traces - you can cut one, two, or all of them to make it into a bi-colour, single colour, or magical no-colour LED.

The official Raspberry Pi 7” Touchscreen allows you to add touch inputs to your programs, creating a new way to interact with your projects. It also makes for a fantastic desktop screen for day-to-day use of your Raspberry Pi. Wrap it in one of our screen cases and take it anywhere – events, Raspberry Jams or even just your friends house for a coding evening!

For smaller projects, LCD and ePaper displays are a fun way to add a visual element to your projects. With simple code and wiring, they’re great for projects that require text, menus and navigation.

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LCD screens are useful and found in many parts of our life. At the train station, parking meter, vending machines communicating brief messages on how we interact with the machine they are connected to. LCD screens are a fun way to communicate information in Raspberry Pi Pico projects and other Raspberry Pi Projects. They have a big bright screen which can display text, numbers and characters across a 16 x 2 screen. The 16 refers to 16 characters across the screen, and the 2 represents the number of rows we have. We can get LCD screens with 20x2, 20x4 and many other configurations, but 16x2 is the most common.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to connect an LCD screen, an HD44780, to a Raspberry Pi Pico via the I2C interface using the attached I2C backpack, then we will install a MicroPython library via the Thonny editor and learn how to use it to write text to the display, control the cursor and the backlight.

2. Import four librariesof pre-written code. The first two are from the Machine library and they enable us to use I2C and GPIO pins. Next we import the sleep function from Time enabling us to pause the code. Finally we import the I2C library to interact with the LCD screen.from machine import I2C, Pin

3. Create an objecti2c to communicate with the LCD screen over the I2C protocol. Here we are using I2C channel 0, which maps SDA to GP0 and SCL to GP1.i2c = I2C(0, sda=Pin(0), scl=Pin(1), freq=400000)

5. Create an objectlcdto set up the I2C connection for the library. It tells the library what I2C pins we are using, set via the i2c object, the address of our screen, set via I2C_ADDRand finally it sets that we have a screen with two rows and 16 columns.lcd = I2cLcd(i2c, I2C_ADDR, 2, 16)

6. Create a loopto continually run the code, the first line in the loop will print the I2C address of our display to Thonny’s Python Shell.while True:

8. Write two lines of textto the screen. The first will print “I2C Address:” followed by the address stored inside the I2C_ADDR object. Then insert a new line character “\n” and then write another line saying “Tom’s Hardware" (or whatever you want it to say). Pause for two seconds to allow time to read the text.lcd.putstr("I2C Address:"+str(I2C_ADDR)+"\n")

9. Clear the screenbefore repeating the previous section of code, but this time we display the I2C address of the LCD display using its hex value. The PCF8574T chip used in the I2C backpack has two address, 0x20 and 0x27 and it is useful to know which it is using, especially if we are using multiple I2C devices as they may cause a clash on the bus.lcd.clear()

12. Turn the backlight back onand then hide the cursor. Sometimes, a flashing cursor can detract from the information we are trying to communicate.lcd.backlight_on()

13. Create a for loopthat will print the number 0 to 19 on the LCD screen. Note that there is a 0.4 second delay before we delete the value and replace it with the next. We have to delete the text as overwriting the text will make it look garbled.for i in range(20):

Save and runyour code. As with any Python script in Thonny, Click on File >> Saveand save the file to your Raspberry Pi Pico. We recommend calling it i2c_lcd_test.py. When ready, click on the Green play buttonto start the code and watch as the test runs on the screen.

The snappily named Raspberry Pi Pico display 1.54-inch LCD by Spotpear ($11.89) brings in a 240×240 pixel IPS screen and ten buttons in a joypad-like arrangement. There’s four for direction, four for action, a select, and a start. At least, they’re labelled like this. You can use them for anything you like.

There are also some sample UF2 files included along with the C example code, but these appear to have been built for different hardware and work either partially or not at all. The actual example code did compile and work properly.

When we ran the example code, we were impressed with the quality of the screen. With 240×240 pixels in just 1.54 inches, there’s a high pixel density that can give crisp graphics. Obviously, high pixel densities are a double-edged sword. While they can look great, it does mean higher RAM use, more time transferring data, and more data to process.

Fortunately, Pico is well-suited to the task of driving screens. Each pixel can take 16 bits of colour data, so a full-frame buffer is just 115,200 bytes. The display data is transferred by SPI, and Pico has a maximum SPI frequency of half the clock speed. For MicroPython, that means 62.5MHz. The actual data transfer rate is a little less than this because of overhead of the protocol, but we were able to drive full-frame refreshes at over 40 fps, which is plenty for smooth animations.

Obviously, if you’re looking to do animations, sending the data is only half the story. You also need to calculate the frame before it’s displayed. If you’re using MicroPython, you are quite limited by the amount of processing you can do and still keep a high frame rate (though you could use the second core to offload some of the processing). With C, you’ve got much more scope, especially as you could potentially offload the data transfer using direct memory access (DMA).

The one disappointing thing about the screen is that there’s no control over the backlight. According to the documentation, it should be attached to pin 13, but it isn’t. You can’t turn it on or off – it’s just permanently on, and quite bright. That’s a deal-breaker for anything running off battery power, as it will suck up a lot of power. However, if you want a display permanently on, this might be perfectly acceptable.

Each month, HackSpace magazine brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store or your local newsagents.

I am currently having an issue with trying to connect my pi pico with the I2c adapter (LCM1602 of my 1602LCD display. I tried the official example from the raspberry pi github page (It is using the c/++ SDK for pi pico, but this was unsuccessful. I can compile/load the code, but nothing is displayed. I did a I2c bus scan and found out that the I2c address is indeed 0x27. So I know the pins and address are correct. I cant find a good datasheet that gives a overview of all commands for my type of adapter. They also do this weird thing in the code where the send a one byte command in six bytes ( void lcd_send_byte(uint8_t val, int mode) ). I am not very familiar with serial communication, so I dont know if this is normal. Can anybody maybe link a good reference datasheet for a LCM1602 I2c adapter or suggest what the best thing to do is from here?