Intro to using LCDs with Arduino :: Video #1 :: Liquid Crystal Display and Arduino Series

hello I hope you're well in this series we are going to learn how to use liquid crystal displays with arduino in the series we're going to have six total videos three of which will be on youtube and we'll start with how to set up an LCD with your arduino and then we will jump into the liquid crystal library functions and those will encompass two videos a part one and a part two we'll be going through all of the functions in that library and then we'll jump into several practical examples so one will be user interface with potentiometer so basically having things displayed on your LCD that you can select with an LCD with the potentiometer like option one two or three and then having a user interface with a button selector so you have buttons to kind of move the cursor around and select options and then finally we'll do a practical example with displaying tweets that you get from Twitter so you know having a display on your project can really mean the difference between a good user experience and one that's maybe a little frustrating because if you have a project that people have to interact with having some type of graphical user interface can really assist them to kind of accomplish what it is that's supposed to be done on the project you know I've always been a little frightened by the idea of using a display because I thought maybe it added a level of complexity that I just wasn't ready for but to my delightful surprise I was dead wrong it turns out that using LCDs with Arduino isn't incredibly easy and it is super easy also to integrate with your project and this is all because of the liquid crystal library that comes pre-installed on your Arduino IDE and it's really kind of the crux of making the LCDs work so easily and it's it's really the key component to this series so we're going to get very familiar with the liquid crystal display library using the functions but you know let's let's just take a step back a second ask ourselves well you know why why would we go with a liquid crystal display I mean there's there's lots of graphical interfaces but why an LCD so I mean you might be thinking Michael LCDs give me a break that's like 1970s 80s technology I mean hey did your swatch watch break and you're trying to fix it but you know the real deal it's like LCDs there's a lot of good reasons to use it first off they're extremely affordable I've got I got mine and it is a 16 column two row LCD very common type and I got it for just over ten bucks on Jamie Koh and you can really you can find them just about anywhere and you can find them in different sizes different display colors so you know you can probably find a size that fits your budget and so I mean affordability is one good reason to go with an LCD LCD display another thing and I kind of already touched on this is that they're really just about everywhere I mean they're in your automobiles they're in household appliances they're in automation like factories and you just you can't hardly turn and not see an LCD somewhere I mean they might not be on your iPad and they might not be in your computer but just because they're not there doesn't mean they're not just about everywhere else and so the fact that they're plentiful is good for us and why is that the reason is there's a lot of support out there for us so if you're trying to do new and cool things somebody very likely has probably done that new thing already it's kind of funny right but so you can get support for a question you might have you can do a quick search and lots of people use LCDs with Arduino so it's not going to be some new field you're going to have to discover for yourself which is a good thing when you're just jumping into it and then finally LCDs again with this liquid crystal display library are so easy to use that it allows you just kind of jump in quickly you don't have a lot of there's not a lot of back learning you have to do you just got to kind of familiarize yourself with the library with the functions in the library and then you can really just get going so good reasons to use LCDs so that's enough that's kind of the introduction that's what we're going to be doing in this series so let's go ahead and get our hands dirty by you Oh

Channel: Programming Electronics Academy

Views: 21,380

Rating: 4.9153438 out of 5

Keywords: Arduino (Computing Platform), Liquid-crystal Display (Invention), LCD, Tutorial, arduino tutorial

Id: dvfaKXV9Lpk

Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 19 2014