Nokia 5110 GLCD and our friendly MSP430

Originally Posted Here

I had this Nokia LCD i picked up a while back. It is perfect when you want to play with graphics on a tiny lcd that comes from the good old days of Nokia’s Monochome days. Several might have spent days playing space invaders/snakes etc.

The time came when I was bored in my hotel room and I had it in my parts bin which i was carrying while moving from Delhi to Pune.

The LCD used a Phillips PCD 8544 Driver which communicates on SPI.The voltage levels are 2.7-3.3V happy for our MSP430.

NYC has a pretty nice explanation on how it works and how to play with it with MSP430 over on his blog

For TL:DR;

The LCD has the following pins to interface to:

Pin Number	Pin Label	Pin Function	Input/Output?	Notes
1	VCC	Positive power supply	Input	Supply range is between 2.7V and 3.3V
2	GND	Ground	Input
3	SCE	Chip select	Input	Active low
4	RST	Reset	Input	Active low
5	D/C	Mode select	Input	Select between command mode (low) and data mode (high).
6	DN(MOSI)	Serial data in	Input
7	SCLK	Serial clock	Input
8	LED	LED backlight supply	Input	Maximum voltage supply is 3.3V.

The display is divided into 6 horizontal bands of 8 bits each (48) and 84 columns .

At a time you write to a single bank.

And you can continue to update only a single bank just in case you have dynamic data in that particular bank.

The communication is done using SPI.

The code that i used is based on RobG’s post.

It displays the temperature (from the internal sensor ofcourse!) and some static text

Connections are as follows(PORT1):

• LCD5110_SCLK_PIN- BIT5
• LCD5110_DN_PIN- BIT7
• LCD5110_SCE_PIN- BIT0
• LCD5110_DC_PIN- BIT1

Code is available here on as a gist .

Just incase you need to play more with graphics see this cool post by Sparkfun

If you have any difficulties post here in comments.