Adafruit RGB 16x2 LCD and Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi

by Adafruit

This Adafruit Pi Plate makes it a doddle to add a 16x2 character display (with RGB backlight) to your Raspberry Pi!

  • 16x2 Character LCD
  • Available in both positive and negative versions (see below)
  • RGB backlight
  • 5 buttons (4-way direction pad, and one select) provide programmable inputs 
  • Contrast control
  • Extra-tall 26-pin GPIO header so the plate sits above USB and Ethernet jacks.
  • Uses only two pins (I2C) on the Raspberry Pi GPIO leaving the rest available for your doomsday device *ahem* project!
  • Can be used with other I2C bus devices

Please make sure you have selected the correct variant (either positive or negative) before checking out your order.

Compatible with Revision 1 and Revision 2 Raspberry Pi's

The nice folks at Adafruit have put together a handy product tutorial page for assembly instructions before purchasing and some Python code to help you easily talk to the LCD and buttons You can also easily query the 5 keypad buttons to get input through the library, so you get extra buttons without using any more pins. The buttons are automatically de-bounced inside the library.

(At this time, the code and plate can control the RGB backlight of our character LCDs by turning each LED on or off. This means you can display the following colors: Red, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Violet, White and all off. There is no support for PWM control of the backlight at this time, so if you need to have more granular control of the RGB backlight to display a larger range of colors then this plate can't do that because the I2C expander does not have PWM output.)

5 customer reviews

8 years ago
The product still does the job, BUT.... Adafruit have apparently tried to consolidate their software. The new software has the 'I2C plate' code bundled with the GPIO based product. Very confusing. Also it has issues. Scrolling is awful. It scrolls the whole 2 lines at once. And you cannot address lines directly. I looked for the old version of the software. In that, the i2c library has gone, just missing, lost ?. I found a version of that library pertaining to be for the beagleboneBlack (a fork of Pi version) (Tried it...It WORKS, with a few minor compatibility changes.) I now use the OLD version of Adafruit I2C Plate with the forked I2C. I have written my own code for writing individual lines, will write my own line scroll (a bit harder). I have two simple python files for these drivers, and have uninstalled all the Adafruit bloat. Note that colours are on or off, not variable as implied in the code.
by Rich about Adafruit RGB 16x2 LCD and Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
8 years ago
With just 4 wires attached to the header instead of the 26 pin GPIO (5v, gnd, SDA, SCL) - this makes a convenient separate display for my streaming radio project - connecting to those pins through the voice hat that I am using to drive the speaker in its cardboard box. I have the pi (2) in a much modified Smarti-PI (Lego) case (adapted to take the ((Google) voice) hat.) Using python3 - the install with pip needs to be updated to pip3 - then it works. Could do with some slightly better documentation - you mostly have to read the code - not too hard, though! Some of the code is for the fully wired (to GPIO) unit rather than this i2c version, so a little confusing. The (non-plate) examples mangle the voice hat - once I figured out not to use those examples it was good.
by Rich about Adafruit RGB 16x2 LCD and Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
9 years ago
Hello, The LCD was easy to assemble, just a little bit of soldering. The instructions for assembly were easy to find and the code exaples allowed me to quickly put it in production. It is currently used at home to display the time and date and the minutes until the next bus at the nearest bus stop.
by Fran?§ois about Adafruit RGB 16x2 LCD and Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io