What’s better than a 16×2 display? One that shouts at you in color! Instead of just having blue and white (or red and black), this LCD has full color RGB characters on a dark background! You can change the character display colors to red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, or chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person.

Adafruit had these custom made to their specification so that you can use them in existing LCD projects and they’ll still work – just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear red-on-black). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~20mA per LED. There’s a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!

Comes with a single 16×2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and header pins.

Specifications:

• 16 characters by 2 rows
• RGB selectable text color on black background
• 6-pin parallel HD44780 interface (for data)
• 3-pin R/G/B PWM-compatible common-anode color interface (or manually turn on 1 channel for single-color background) with built-in 220 ohm current-limiting resistors
• 3~5VDC operations
• 27 x 71mm (1.1 x 2.8″) screen size
• Negative Polarization