Adafruit
RGB backlight negative LCD 20x4 + extras [RGB on black]
This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark/blac...
This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20x4 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
One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but 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 ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). 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 20x4 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header.
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 is a small electronic component that lights up when current flows through it in the correct direction. In this kit, LEDs create the flashing effect, so polarity and correct soldering matter for the project to work.
- 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, usually referring to an LED that can mix those three colours. It matters because controlling an RGB LED teaches how separate outputs combine to create different colours.
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