HD44780 LCD User-Defined Graphics

The HD44780 is a controller for character-based liquid crystal displays (LCDs). In addition to the standard pre-programmed characters, it allows you to define up to eight of your own graphic patterns on a 5-by-7 (or sometimes 5-by-8) grid. This page lets you experiment with various patterns and shows the numbers that need to be programmed into the controller to get those patterns on to the display.

Peter Ouwehand has written an excellent article describing how to use the HD44780.

Click in the green grid to the left to set and clear pixels to create the graphic you want. Then copy the decimal, hex or binary values as necessary and paste them into your program. If it doesn’t work, try enabling JavaScript. If it still doesn’t work, please let me know with an e-mail to the address on the home page. It would be helpful if you could say what version of what browser on what operating system you are using. I am aware that Internet Explorer can complain that this page contains a lot of JavaScript.

Pattern library

Click on any of the library characters below to use it as a base from which to work.

Thanks to Arthur Benemann, Mark Colan, Tore Eriksson, Tomasz Jozwik, Vincent Gijsen, lukas2005, Δαμίγος, Rud Merriam, Matheus Dal Mago, Godbr, JS, Didier Guillemyn and Robert G. Schaffrath.

A user of the Arduino LiquidCrystal library reports that it is necessary to call lcd.clear() after using lcd.createChar() for the latter to have any effect.

If you create any new characters you’d be happy to see included in the library, please e-mail the decimal values and a brief explanation of what the character represents to the address on the home page.