Black letters & numbers are not much use on an LCD display unless if you backlight it. Hrm, what colour to use…

With the Adafruit RGB backlight, you’re good to go! Choose whatever colour the RGB LEDs allow – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse, or just leave it off for a neutral background.

This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight. These are custom-made to Adafruit’s 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 for backlight. 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 strip of header. The tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!