These displays were used in old Nokia 5110/3310 cell phones (before the
smart-phone fad turned every cell phone into a TV). It's a 84x48 pixel
monochrome LCD display. These displays are small, only about 1.5"
diagonal, but very readable and come with a white backlight. This
display is made of 84x48 individual pixels, so you can use it for
graphics, text or bitmaps. These displays are inexpensive, easy to use,
require only a few digital I/O pins and are fairly low power as well
To drive the display, you will need 3 to 5 digital output pins
(depending on whether you want to manually control the chip select and
reset lines). Another pin can be used to control (via on/off or PWM) the
backlight - the backlight LEDs are wired to a transistor.
The display driver is a PCD8544 chip, and it runs at 3.3V so you'll need
a 3V supply handy (you don't need that much current though, maybe 10mA
tops). Logic levels must be 3V to prevent damage but we include a free level shifter chip so you can easily connect it to 5V logic such as an Arduino.
