 The Great Search brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit every single week lately There's a private venture and help you. Yes, you find things you need on digikey.com Lady data what in the world are you trying to find on digikey.com this week? Okay this week We're going to Locate some character LCDs that have alternative interfaces. So since we're gonna slice the video Let's go to the overhead and I'll explain my current state so this is a very standard character LCD display it has a blue Backlight and then white characters that shine through it's a negative polarity Display and this uses the parallel interface. So you have in addition to power and ground you have Select in a right latch enable pin and then use either four or eight I open So basically you need at least six IO pins and some people use you can use up to like nine IO pins And that's a lot of IO pins. Most people don't want to spend that many pins Especially if you have low cost Mac controllers that don't have a lot of GPIO. Why waste it on an LCD? So this is a sample that I got That has a SPI or I squared C interface and then I realized These are actually, you know fairly popular and a lot of options the place. I got the only had blue and white The trade-off is the backlight has to be on and this is not daylight readable but I thought I'd show how on DigiKey you can get almost like any configuration you want of Character LCD is including I squared C or SPI interface. So let's go to my computers So what I first looked up Character Watch out. There's two categories. One is LED character in numeric, which I accidentally went to first But what's nice is when you go down and look at the image like wait, this is you know, LED This is not character LCD. So LED works by You see there's one LED for every segment and it literally like blasts light through to light up that segment whereas with character LCDs Instead of LEDs what they do is they have you know an 8x5 dot matrix and the Liquid crystal turns on or off to let the backlight through or if it's trans-flective it reflects light back into your eye So different uses, you know feel like when should I use LED versus LCD? You know LED is gonna be a lot more is a lot faster update and it's gonna look a lot It's it's kind of daylight readable and night readable but You know, it adds up fat. It also if you don't use many characters LED is good, especially if you only have to show like two or three digits But if you're gonna show like text, especially other languages and stuff Character LCDs is where it's at. So let's go back and select the correct category Okay, so Lots of options and you'll notice there's There's a lot of different Varieties there are character LCDs like these and if you remember a long time ago We covered an i-squared C to LCD converter chip. This is a raw LCD So you would not you don't write it with i-squared C or even parallel You actually have to like toggle all the IO pins very very fast Usually you have a controller driver chip to do that some microcontrollers have a built-in LCD driver but like it's a very specific thing and I think we did a show a Few months ago, maybe a year or two ago where I showed like hey You can manually control it with a GPIO on any microcontroller, but it doesn't look very good You get ghosting and it's hard to keep up. So really you want a microcontroller that supports it but there are also lots of character LCDs like this where You see you have a smaller number of pins and it's like a module and there's like this metal plate that goes around The LCD and this has the controller as well for you and then again gives you i-squared C or SPI or parallel. So if you go over Here you can see the different interfaces So if you see dash that means there's no like there's no controller. You're like you have to toggle the pins Parallel is again that's kind of standard Display, but you said you see oh you got like serial and i-squared C. So a lot of varieties there let's Pair down what's available to see we can get to so first off moved only for active and Then let's just all solely look up stuff in stock Okay, so again some of these are Manual drive I don't want those I want only ones that have i-squared C. Let's say so I'm going to Select all these and then option click i-squared C over here and Then we've got 75 options. So what's options here? So not surprising New Haven is like a big seller of these Some of these have an RGB Backlight and you'll notice a couple there's like two basic types of LCDs There's the ones that are negative Polarizing and these have kind of like a cool look because the backlight is the color of the text and then the background Is like a dark blue or black and and they look they're very striking looking But they again are not very daylight readable if you want daylight readable ones Ironically, you want to get ones that have black text and especially if they say trans reflective I think yeah the trans reflective ones rather than the passive ones Are the ones that look best in daylight you also want to check the data sheet People always ask me like what kind of LCDs are best for daylight So definitely don't get the negative polarity ones get the positive second You can get them with different color backlights now You're gonna pay more if you want an RGB backlight like this one But what's cool is you can actually do color mixing to get like you know any shade and it could be nice if you want to like I use RGB backlights for our testers because People don't always read the text, but if it's like flashing red, they're like oh something went wrong Where is it's a nice green color means go So even though I don't use all the colors, you know, sometimes I have this stick if it's in the middle programming I'll make it orange or blue and then green or red on success or fail So there's a couple different types here There's this is like a slim type, which is I think very cute and I like the little mounting tabs There's also ones that are FPC mount This is kind of like a classic original style all of them by the way will have LED backlights the old the old style used to have Electro luminescent panel and they were extremely loud and very power-consuming now. It's LED, which means you can often PWM the backlight as well There's also OLED versions They're more expensive, but they like look really cool because again, they have that nice Glowing look and and they do look better during daylight But they're a little bit more expensive They also come in like you can get four by four by 20 is kind of the largest you're gonna get four characters by four rows By 20 characters But you can get like two by eight Ten by four You'll get anything almost less than that. It's just that 40 by 20 by four is the largest of the classic LCD Configurations if you want something bigger you're gonna probably go with a tft display So there's a lot of options here another thing to watch for is These days almost all LCDs run from three or five volts, but some of the older Chipsets only one off of five and so if you are using a modern microcontroller Check the voltage supply to see like it's not guaranteed like this one. For example, you see it's like a five volt only It's an old style, you know, this is like yellow background is very old style And then some of the modern ones only one from three point three not three to five So it's it's not guaranteed that you're gonna get Three volt or five volt compatibility do do take a look to see what it is Oh, yeah, I AP that was the one that the sample I was using which is very cool So in fact, I think that this is going to be this has been compatible. That's sorry code compatible This is gonna be my pick. I like this because It's got the transfective Display cool white background. I squared C uses the chipset that I've already got code for black text on white so this one's really good and then Let's see. Also, let's look by quality available Yeah, this one's really good and then this one. These are both two that I think would be really really sweet Very nice looking. So these are my Picks for the great search