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Adafruit

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This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16x2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark/b...

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This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16x2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark/black background! That means you can change the character display colors to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person

We had these custom made to our specification so that you can use them in existing LCD projects and they'll still work - just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear red-on-black). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~20mA per LED. There's a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!

Comes with a single 16x2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time! For more information, check out our detailed step-by-step tutorial for both Arduino & CircuitPython

Jargon buster

Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.

LCD
LCD stands for liquid crystal display, a screen technology that uses a backlight and liquid crystals to show images or text. It matters because LCD modules usually need a display driver and enough controller pins or a bus interface to send image data.
LED
A light-emitting diode (LED) is a small electronic component that emits light when current flows through it in the correct direction. Because it only conducts one way, its polarity matters, and a through-hole LED must be soldered the correct way around to light up.
potentiometer
A variable resistor usually turned with a knob or shaft to create an adjustable electrical signal. It is often used for inputs such as volume, brightness or position, so it helps beginners learn how a microcontroller reads changing values.
RGB
Short for red, green and blue, the three primary colours of light that are mixed in varying amounts to make a wide range of colours. In electronics RGB can refer to an LED or pixel that blends these three colours, or to a colour signal or interface that carries separate red, green and blue channels.
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