SparkFun Electronics - Serial Enabled LCD Backpack

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Product Info

Serial Enabled LCD Backpack

sku: LCD-00258

Description: The serial enabled LCD backpack allows you to control a parallel based LCD over a single-wire serial interface. The SerLCD backpack takes care of all the HD44780 commands allowing seamless integration with any micro that can communicate over a wide range of TTL serial baud rates. The SerLCD currently supports 16 and 20 character wide screens with 2 or 4 lines of display.

Communication with SerLCD requires 5V TTL serial at a default baud rate of 9600bps (8-N-1). You can adjust the baud to any standard rate between 2400 and 38400bps. The power, ground and RX pins are all broken out to a 3.5mm pitch screw terminal.

SerLCD has the ability to dim the backlight to conserve power if needed. There is also a potentiometer on the backpack to adjust the contrast.

Features:

New PIC 16F688 utilizes onboard UART for greater communication accuracy
Adjustable baud rates of 2400, 4800, 9600 (default), 14400, 19200 and 38400
Operational Backspace
Greater processing speed at 10MHz
Incoming buffer stores up to 80 characters
Backlight transistor can handle up to 1A
Pulse width modulation of backlight allows direct control of backlight brightness and current consumption
All surface mount design allows a backpack that is half the size of the original
Faster boot-up time
Boot-up display can be turned on/off via firmware
User definable splash screen

Documents:

SerLCD v2.5 Datasheet
SerLCD Pin Assignment
SerLCD v2 Schematic
We aim to educate! Please do not use our code or schematics for commercial use. SerLCD-v2.zip source code

Dimensions: 0.56" x 1.75"

Pricing

	35 in stock backorder allowed

$16.95	price
$15.26	10-99 (10% off)
$13.56	100+ (20% off)

	quantity

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Comments

9 comments

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Doctor Who

+1.8

| December 12, 2008 at 0:49 AM

Hello!
My Serial Backpack arrived when the firm more or less insisted it would.

I have just completed a trial using it with the LCD display program for Linux LCDd and lcdproc, and after configuring the program to think it was talking to a certain vendor it just worked perfectly.

Additional details, the display is one that was a "pull" I believe it was recovered from the display for an older laser printer. And the programs were retrieved from www.linuxpackages.net and the serial device talking to both is a USB breakout board for the FT232R device.

In a word, "Finestkind!".

	by krich11 +1.6 \| April 29, 2009 at 11:43 AM 0
Just a suggestion for the next revision of this excellent product. How about adding in a keypad encoder function? The encoder would scan up to a 4x4 keypad and output the key press information on the TX line of the serial port. (Similar to this, http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk/htm/Lcd03tech.htm)

HP22UK

+0.6

| June 17, 2009 at 12:54 AM

I'm new to this and found the datasheet unclear and inconsistent about how to clear screen etc.
Serial.print(0x7C, BYTE);
Serial.print(0x01, BYTE);
Just wasn't doing it!

Several hours of searching finally answered the question! to clear the screen you use this;
Serial.print(0xFE, BYTE);
Serial.print(0x01, BYTE);

A really useful explanation and more info is to be found here;

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/SparkFunSerLCD

No author mentioned, but thanks whoever you are! :-)

AaronW

+3.4

| September 23, 2009 at 2:31 PM

In the data sheet the "CHAR" labels could be more clearly explained. I eventually figure out that they are a type of ASCII command and found a table that list the hex equivalents for each "CHAR" command you have listed. A suggestion for future revision of this document would be to include the hex version of each command statement instead of only listing the keyboard command, since they are not always available when controlling the lcd from a microcontroller

	by RandomEskimo +1.3 \| October 20, 2009 at 7:51 PM +0.28
I am using a PICAXE 20m chip and I don't know what the serout command should be can someone please help me here.

	by -J +1.2 \| November 21, 2009 at 2:24 AM 0
When i recived this i had some problems making it work. Text sent to display showed up as garbage. Startup message displayed nicely. After issuing a 0x12 (ctrl-R) while startup message showed, resetting the chip to 9600 baud it worked perfect. Very nice product.

	by fireteam +1.1 \| January 13, 2010 at 4:43 PM 0
Will this work with the 16x2 3.3V LCD? I am afraid that it will only work on 5V ones

	by power +1.1 \| January 18, 2010 at 8:22 AM 0
When looking at the backpack with the pins facing away from you, which is pin number 1? there are no markings on my backpack? Also, How can i get it to communicate with a BS2?

cbell

+1.4

| January 28, 2010 at 1:03 PM

I agree with the need for a little clarification in the docs... my (also recycled) Sharp LCD has a 2x7 (data) + 1x3 (backlight LED) header for the interface, so does not plug straight in... where is pin 1 on the backpack? There is a suspicious dot at the far end away from the serial/power screw terminals, but it IS *NOT* PIN 1!!!! There is a cryptic reference in the datasheet to pin 15/16 as being near the sparkfun URL, [which is not on the current board...] (but is in the image in the datasheet). Once I got that sorted, it works great! I would suggest a diagram included with the pinout doc that shows the pin orientations.

Also on commands, it is still not clear to me what to send to program the LCD size, after the command byte (0x7C) do you send "3" [0x33] or 0x03? And how do you use the cursor (blink/underline) on/off? [which should also include the 0x09 command for blinking text?] I have the positioning commands working.