I am trying to make a schematic of : Adafruit 16x2 Character LCD + Keypad for Raspberry Pi.
I unable to find the symbol of the hd44780 symbol for kicad. can someone help me with this?
Just make one, if you don’t know how then this is a great opportunity to learn. It’s a skill that you will have to acquire early on, there is no way around it.
You can take 1x18 pin connector symbol and edit it slightly, it’s a 3 minute job.
Doesn’t look hard.
Incidentally if anybody is tempted to make that I2C to parallel adaptor board in the project mentioned in the last reply, you can buy those off the shelf. They often come piggybacked on parallel HD44780 displays for a buck or two more, such is the economy of scale of big production runs.
I do not really understand the popularity of those HD44780’s with generic I2C interface chip.
These days a small uC is about the same price as such a chip, and with it, you have such a plethora of extra options. The first is a much lower overhead and faster communication. Instead of weird driver meandering to toggle I/O pins, you can just send ascii strings over I2C (or uart, or SPI) to control the LCD (Inclusive control characters such as carriage return, page feed to clear the lcd, etc).
As later extensions, you can add some keyboard scanning algorithm. You can for example make it (software) compatible with the Holtek 16k33. (but driving an HD44780 instead of LED’s).
And then, if you also add some software to read out some rotary encoders (need faster scanning then keyboard matrix) and control some extra LED’s, then you have a very neat “front panel” project. This makes sense in any project where the front panel has a relatively complex interface. On the hardware side you would just have a small cable for power and data to the front panel.
The Arduino is the gateway drug of electronics.
It’s just a HD44780 with a serial interface for a buck or two more than the parallel interface version. What you are describing is a front panel project with its own merits and costing. By all means develop such an interface and publish it to show people how you think it should be done.
For that matter you could develop a front panel based on a OLED or TFT display. That’s a whole different discussion.
As said above, quick and easy to make. But, there are several already included in Kicad - the layouts just look different.
In the Symbol editor, type LCD into it’s search field and you won’t see HD447… but you’ll see that several LCD’a have the same Pinouts. You can use one or make your own (symbols and footprint). The resistors and Trimpot in your image are not part of the Footprints or Symbols (they are the hookups to it).
The Look is a personal preference - you can make it look how you want. Also, beside the Schematic symbol, there’s Footprint for the PCB and they often have a geometry to match the Hardware - you get to make that, too!
EDIT: I pulled one out of the drawer (last image) - this one has an I2C gizmo attached to it - you can jimmy-up the symbol/footprint accordingly… I paid $5 for these LCD’s with the I2C on Amazon…
Example of a stock LCD part
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