LCD character displays

There is nothing better than writing any information from the Arduino to a small LCD character display. They are incredibly handy and just look plain cool. Even better, Arduino has a built-in library to do this. Let's explore how we can implement it.

Getting ready

We will need the following ingredients for this recipe:

• An Arduino board connected to a computer via USB

• An LCD character display of any dimension—16 x 2 is the standard size

• A 10K-ohm potentiometer

• Jumper wires

How to do it…

First, we need to connect the monitor to the Arduino. This generally requires a minimum of 6 digital pins as shown in the following diagram:

This is one possible breadboard implementation:

Follow these steps to connect an LCD to the Arduino:

1. Connect GND to the VSS and R/W pins.

2. Connect 5V to the Vcc/Vdd input.

3. Connect 6 digital pins to E (enable), RS, and DB4-DB7. This is the 4-bit way of connecting HD44780-based displays, such as the common LCD character displays.

4. Lastly, connect a 10K-potentiometer...