Skip to content

Johnny Five, how to work with an LCD Screen

This post is part of the Johnny Five series. See the first post here.

An LCD screen is a pretty cool component because we can use it for many different projects in creative ways.

This one I have is named 1602A.

It has 16 pins. I wired it in this way:

The potentiometer has 3 pins. The middle one is connected to the LCD screen, the left one is 0V and the right one 5V:

That’s it for the wiring.

Create a new lcd.js file and load this code:

const { Board, LCD } = require("johnny-five")
const board = new Board()

board.on("ready", function () {})

Now initialize a new LCD object from the LCD class.

The exact initialization procedure depends on the kind of display used. In my case, it was this:

const lcd = new LCD({ pins: [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] })

Finally, call the print() method to display a string:

const { Board, LCD } = require("johnny-five")
const board = new Board()

board.on("ready", function () {
  const lcd = new LCD({ pins: [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] })
  lcd.print("Hello World!")
})

and run the program using node lcd.js to see it work:

The LCD class also offers those cool methods:

You can find out more on http://johnny-five.io/api/lcd/.

→ Get my JavaScript Beginner's Handbook

I wrote 17 books to help you become a better developer, download them all at $0 cost by joining my newsletter

  • C Handbook
  • Command Line Handbook
  • CSS Handbook
  • Express Handbook
  • Git Cheat Sheet
  • Go Handbook
  • HTML Handbook
  • JS Handbook
  • Laravel Handbook
  • Next.js Handbook
  • Node.js Handbook
  • PHP Handbook
  • Python Handbook
  • React Handbook
  • SQL Handbook
  • Svelte Handbook
  • Swift Handbook

JOIN MY CODING BOOTCAMP, an amazing cohort course that will be a huge step up in your coding career - covering React, Next.js - next edition February 2025

Bootcamp 2025

Join the waiting list