Serial LCD display

Hardware
1

I have been wondering about using a serial LCD display connected to my photon to display IFTTT info. Is it possible to connect the serial display to the TX/RX photon pins and ground and use for display? Is there a software library to support driving a serial LCD display to scroll display info
thanks
tom

2

The general answer would be: Yes, it’s possible and there are libraries.

But if you can use them with your display depends on the display. So the type of hardware you’re thinkong of would be good to include in your question.

3

Greetings:

I have a few backlight serial LCD displays which are 2 by 16 and 4 by 16 that I could use for my project. They were displays I used a few years ago with my Parallax processors and would like to use them with the Photon. The are simple three wire serial input displays. Power/ground and serial leads. Should I look in the Photon documentation for LCD display drivers, is a driver even needed for a simple serial display?
thanks
Tom

4

As said, the display type (esp. the driver chip) would be required to answer this question.
But if you already did use these displays you should be able to port your code for the Photon.

The Photon docs as such won’t tell you about displays but about the way to use the Serial1 interface for communicating with any serial device.
But you could look a http://build.particle.io (Web IDE) which sports a library repository. Maybe there is a lib for your displays already.

5

@Geotek50, if you can supply some model numbers or links for your displays, we can do a little research to see if any libraries are available and what would be involved to port them.

6

If you are using the ones like Sparkfun sells with a backpack, then I wrote some helper functions (not a library really) that I found useful. Here's the post:

I find these super useful for debugging!

1 Like
7

Greetings:

I looked up my two LCD displays and they both serial display.
1, model ILM-216 2X16 with PIC16F84 chip from Scott Edwards for Parallax BS2 use.

  1. Systronix (QY-2004A) 20X4 LCD display based on Hitachi 44780 display with a Parallax serial add-on board

  2. I also have a Grove 16X2 LCD which I could use.

thanks in advance for you rhelp
tom

8

I use this kind of I2C backpack for standard character LCD displays : http://www.ebay.com/itm/Serial-IIC-I2C-Adapter-1602-1604-2002-LCD-Backpack-Arduino-FAST-SHIP-US-SELLER-/171036006949
Many other sellers of the same type.

Works with LiquidCrystalLCD_I2C

    #include "LiquidCrystal_I2C.h"

LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x3F,40,4);  // set the LCD address to 0x27 for a 16 chars and 2 line display

void setup()
{
  RGB.control(true);
  RGB.brightness(0);    
    
  lcd.init();                      // initialize the lcd 

  // Print a message to the LCD.
  lcd.backlight();
  lcd.print("Test Display I2C");
  lcd.setCursor(0,1);
  lcd.print("Version 1.0");
  lcd.setCursor(0,2);
  lcd.print("Line3");
  lcd.setCursor(0,3);
  lcd.print("Line4");