Arduino Serial Terminal Clear Screen

The SerLCD backpack can also be found on a variety of serial enabled character LCDs with different color schemes, sizes, and input voltages. In this tutorial, we will connect to a serial enabled LCD and send ASCII characters to the display using an Arduino microcontroller. Required MaterialsTo follow along with this tutorial, you will need the following materials at a minimum.

Depending on what you have, you may not need everything on this list. Add it to your cart, read through the guide, and adjust the cart as necessary. ToolsYou may need a soldering iron, solder, and, and screw driver depending on your setup.

Contrast ControlThe SerLCD and built-in serial LCDs comes equipped with a 10k potentiometer to control the contrast of the LCD. This is set during assembly and testing but may need correcting for your specific LCD module. Temperature and supply voltage can affect the contrast of the LCD.

While powered, simply adjust the potentiometer with a screw driver.SerLCD BackpackSerial Enabled LCD 16x2Serial Enabled LCD 20x4Hi-Current Control PinThe SerLCD v2.5 uses a general purpose, 1000mA NPN transistor to control the LCDs backlight. If you purchased the SerLCD module, you may use this pin as a general purpose, high power control pin. If you issue the backlight on/off command to the SerLCD or built-in serial LCD, the BL pin on the board can also be used to power / control other circuits with a maximum current of 1000 mA. This is usually the last pin on the top row of the LCD. Check your datasheet for proper pin outs.SerLCD BackpackSerial Enabled LCD 16x2Serial Enabled LCD 20x4. Hardware Hookup Assembling the SerLCD BackpackInsert the SerLCD backpack's long end of the headers through the back of a basic LCD. The header on the top side of the LCD.

The LCD should look like the images below after the terminals are cleaned (assuming that you are using water-soluble flux). If you are using the through holes under the screw terminals, make sure to solder to the pins before assembling the backpack to the basic LCD.Top ViewBottom ViewConnecting to an ArduinoTo power and control a serial enabled LCD, you will need three pins. There are two rows of headers broken out on the backpack and built-in serial enabled LCDs. They are electrically identical, so you can use either one. The SerLCD backpack comes pre-populated with a 3-pin screw terminal. Simply insert to each of the screw terminals and tighten.

You can also solder directly to the plated through holes on the bottom of the backpack.Screw TerminalsPlated Through HolesInstead of a screw terminal, the built-in serial enabled LCDs come pre-populated with a 3-pin polarized JST connector. The would be the easiest to connect to an Arduino. The cable only connects one way; press it in until it clicks. JST connectors are designed to be very snug; don't pull on the wires to disconnect it,.Input for Serial Enabled LCD 16x2Input for Serial Enabled LCD 20x4. Note: The JST's pinout for the 16x2 and 20x4 are different.

Make sure to reference the silkscreen to power and control the LCD as opposed to the wire's color.Hookup TableThere are only three connections you need to make to the LCD. Check your LCD's pinout before connecting to your Arduino. If you look closely at the LCD's with the JST connector, the input voltage (VDD) and Rx are in different locations on the board depending on how it was populated. Serial Enabled LCD PinoutArduino PinDescriptionRXD11Serial UART receive input to the display.9600 baud (default), 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity.GNDGNDGround for the power supply.VDD3.3V or 5VPower supply, this should be either +3.3V or +5Vdepending on the specs of your LCD.

Skill Level:Beginnerby June 17, 2011 Overview:The Serial LCD Kit includes all the parts you need to add a serial 'backpack' to a 16x2 LCD. The kit includes a pre-programmed ATmega328 microprocessor, which reads a serial stream of data and (after a little heavy-lifting) instantly displays it on the LCD. Interfacing the Serial LCD with an Arduino, or other serial-enabled devices, allows you to easily print GPS coordinates, short messages or any other information onto the LCD.This tutorial will cover everything you need to know to get up and running with the Serial Enabled LCD Kit. We'll first go over assembly so you can turn that bag-o-parts into something that hopefully resembles any pictures you may have seen of the kit.Following assembly, we'll touch on how to actually use the Serial LCD Kit. Specifically, we'll go over how you'd use the thing with everybody's favorite development board, Arduino. There'll be example code galore, and you can even make your own LCD clock! It's gonna be pretty crazy.Requirements:First and foremost, you need the Serial LCD Kit, and everything that comes with it:.1x Serial Enabled LCD Kit PCB.1x with Serial LCD Firmware.1x.1x.1x.1x.2x.2x.1x.1x.1x.1xMissing any parts?

(Bad SparkFun kitters!) Drop our customer service team an. We'll get them out to you as soon as possible.At a minimum, the required tools for assembly are a really, a bit of, and some. In addition to those tools, other items you might find helpful include, and perhaps a, or, to keep everything nice and stable.Finally, you'll need something to send a serial stream of data to the display.

An Arduino works great (any variety, this isn't limited to the Uno) if you want to automate the serial data stream. Or work if you just want to connect the display to your computer and send data via a terminal program. For what it's worth, this tutorial will focus on connecting the display to an Arduino.What it Does:The goal of the Serial LCD Kit is to make controlling an LCD simple and to make wiring to it even simpler. If you wanted, you could abstain from using the serial backpack and wire an Arduino directly up to the LCD.

To that point, there are loads of great examples, and even some, that make interfacing a microcontroller directly to an LCD very easy. However, because the LCD is driven by a parallel interface, those examples require a tangle of wires and anywhere from 6 to 11 pins of the Arduino to control the thing.The microcontroller on the Serial LCD Kit takes care of all of that nasty wiring, so you only need one pin to control the LCD. The Serial LCD's on-board microcontroller parses any incoming commands or characters, and then sends the proper data to the LCD over the multi-wire parallel interface. It's a magic black box, and you don't have to care how it does its job, just that it does it. So let's get it built.How to Use it:Assembly:What you've got in front of you right now is not yet a Serial LCD Kit. First, we've got to turn that bag of parts into a Serial LCD Kit, which will require soldering.

If you've never soldered before, don't fret! This is one of the easier soldering projects, every part is through-hole, and well-spaced. If this is your first time though, I'd encourage you to take a trip over to one of our excellent before picking up the iron.First, pick out the big, ferrari-red PCB. See how one side has white silkscreen printed onto it?

This is the top of the PCB. You'll stick almost every part in on this side and solder the pins to the opposite side.

The only time we'll stray from that is when soldering the LCD, which is the last step.It's pretty obvious where each part goes, but consult the diagram above if you're confused.We'll solder the lowest-profile parts first, so single out that little 10kΩ resistor. Bend it into a 'U' shape and guide the two legs through their mating holes.

Now just flip the board over and solder both legs to the bottom of the PCB. If the resistor keeps falling out before you can get it good and soldered, bend the legs out a little bit to better secure it. Try to keep the part as flush as possible with the PCB.

After soldering, make sure you clip the excess of the legs as close to the solder joint as possible.Next, find all four of the yellow ceramic capacitors, and separate them by their 3-digit code. “104” means 0.1uF, while “220” signifies 22pF.

Don't mix these up. Stick the caps into their corresponding, rectangular footprint, flip over the board and solder up both legs. Clip the excess legs.

Follow the same process for the white, three-pin JST connector, and the silver, oval crystal.Pick out the 10uF electrolytic capacitor. It's a little black, can-looking part. Before plugging it into the board, notice that one of the legs is shorter than the other. Whenever you see this asymmetry, consider it an alert that the part is polarized, which means, in order for the part to work correctly, you have to assemble it in a very specific direction. In this case, the shorter leg signifies the negative pin of the capacitor. If you look closely at this capacitor's landing spot on the PCB, you'll notice an inviting white dash which marks the negative pin. Match up the negatives and follow the same soldering/clipping process as usual.The transistor is also polarized, though all the legs are the same length.

This time notice that the package comes in something of a half-circle shape. Pretend you're plugging a half-circle peg into a half-circle hole, and match up the flat edge of the transistor, with the flat edge printed on the PCB. Solder it just like usual, and work those clippers.Now the big-daddy, the ATmega328. Also polarized! This time there's a notch on the chip, which you'll match up to the notch on the parts landing spot on the PCB. You've got 28 pins to solder this time. Soldering is really just paint-by-number, with the coloring pencils replaced by a scalding iron, isn't it?Last, you'll do up the big, blue trimpot.

This part's polarized, although it'd work either way. You might as well match up the part to the footprint on the board, though.

There's a couple notches on one side of the pot that you can match up to the board. Solder, clip, and dance! You're done.Wait.something's missing.oh, hi LCD!

To connect the LCD to the PCB, we've included a straight 16-pin header with the kit. You'll need to solder this header to both the PCB and the LCD. Solder it first to the LCD, stick the shorter pins into the LCD. Make sure the longer legs are extended out from the back of the LCD and solder all 16-pins on the top side of the LCD. Effort to keep the pins as perpendicular to the LCD as possible.Notice the 16-pin header soldered into the LCD.With the header soldered to the LCD, you'll finally be able to connect the display to the PCB. Remember, we're sticking this part into the bottom side of the PCB, and soldering to the top.

Arduino Serial Clear Screen

Solder up all 16 pins, and that should be it.Hardware: Before you can display anything on the LCD, you'll have to connect something to it. Only three wires are necessary to use the Serial LCD Kit: RX, GND and VCC. Plug the included 3-wire jumper cable into its mating JST connector that you soldered onto the PCB.

This color coded cable has two wires for power, and one for receiving serial data. The red and black wires correspond to +5V and GND, respectively, and the yellow wire is RX.You'll need to figure out how you're going to power the LCD Kit. It doesn't have a regulator on-board, so it's up to you to supply a clean, regulated 5V power source. If you're using an Arduino, you could power the Kit off of the 5V and GND pins – connect red to 5V and black to GND.

Otherwise, there's a ton of options out there for power; you could use a, a, a. The list just goes on. Just make sure you're not supplying any more than 5V (a little less may work, but you'll lose some brightness).After powering the Serial LCD Kit, you should notice the backlight turn on. If the contrast is properly adjusted, you might see the splash screen flash for a second or two.

Most likely though, the contrast won't be set correctly, so you won't see a splash screen. In that case, you may see anything from 32 white boxes to absolutely nothing. You'll have to be quick about it, because the splash screen only remains for a couple seconds before going blank, but try turning the trimpot knob until you've got a good view of the characters on the LCD.The 'Serial' in the Serial LCD Kit can be a little confusing. What it really means is TTL serial,. The voltage on the RX line should only go between 0 and +5V. If you're using a microcontroller (like an Arduino) to talk with the LCD, then you most likely don't have to worry.

Just don't hook up a PC's serial port straight to the LCD and expect it to survive.There's a lot of components that are capable of sending TTL serial data. The most popular here at SparkFun are USB-to-Serial boards (like the ), or an Arduino.

This tutorial is going to assume you have an Arduino for the next few examples. I get it; you're not gonna conform to this passing fad. Feel free to read on, and try to port these examples to your platform.Connect the Arduino to the Serial LCD as follows. If you have a, you may want to expose a few millimeters more of wire to allow them to stick really nicely into the Arduino's headers.Serial LCD KitArduino5V5VGNDGNDRXD3Software:Hello, World: Sending Characters to the DisplayHere's a simple example sketch, which uses the SoftwareSerial library (which is included with recent versions of Arduino) to instill our Arduino with more than just the one, hardware, serial port. Now we can use the hardware serial port to listen to the serial monitor, and the second serial port can be used to talk to the LCD.Here's the code. I bought this thing and I'm confused on what to do with it. I got it all put together and after about four hours finally got something to show on the screen.

I soldered a IC socket on and didn't realize that I have to have the IC in there for it to work. Yeah I know.but, because in the few paragraphs above 'you don't have to use it as an arduino'.

Anyway, I put in the IC and I was amazed something showed up, sweet. So, here's the confusing part for me, why do I have to have the atmega chip in the LCD and also a atmega chip in the arduino? I don't have a FTDI Breakout just yet, but I'm getting on soon, I'm thinking that if I want to use it as a clock I would want the LCD to be programmed with the sketch and all of the other things to make it work. Because you definitely can't upload code to any atmega 328 and slap it into the LCD and expect it to work. So if anyone has any info that could help me that would be awesome, sorry for the rambling on. Hi,I'm hoping someone can help me with this.

I set up all the parts and soldered everything as mentioned above. However, when I upload the first basic code to display the 'Hello, world', absolutely nothing happens. The kit is connected to the arduino (red wire in 5V, black wire in GND and yellow wire in digital 3).

I see that there is light in the actual LCD, however, there is no message. Could it be that the library/code have changed since this tutorial was written? I really hope someone can guide me to solve this issue. In 2003, CU student Nate Seidle fried a power supply in his dorm room and, in lieu of a way to order easy replacements, decided to start his own company. Since then, SparkFun has been committed to sustainably helping our world achieve electronics literacy from our headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.No matter your vision, SparkFun's products and resources are designed to make the world of electronics more accessible. In addition to over 2,000 open source components and widgets, SparkFun offers curriculum, training and online tutorials designed to help demystify the wonderful world of embedded electronics. We're here to help you start something.

SparkFun Electronics.