Nokia 5110 Liquid Crystal Display

I recently discovered surplus Nokia 5110 Liquid Crystal Displays ( LCD ) which were used in Nokia 5110 phones, circa 1998. Thousands of these interesting display modules are available at on-line auction sites. I bought four, about GBP2.30 each; two having a blue back-light and two with white. The resolution is 84 x 48 pixels; overall dimensions 4.5 x 4.5cms. The controller/driver chip is PCD8544. I searched for and downloaded the data sheet; essential reading !

Nokia 5110 LCD types: back-light colour (L) blue (R) white

Communicating with the display uses the SPI ( Serial Peripheral Interface ) bus specification, which is a synchronous MASTER/SLAVE configuration with the MASTER generating the clock. As well as supply and ground, the following 5 connections to the display are needed; Chip Enable ( CE ), Serial Clock ( CLK ), & Serial Data ( DIN ), and additionally, for control purposes, Data/Command ( DC ), and Reset ( RST ). Back-light ( BL ) connection is optional.

6 config bytes being sent to display on SPI: top CE, mid CLK, bottom DIN

Basically, using the display requires (i) configuring display settings, and (ii) knowing how the addressing of the DDRAM works when writing data for displaying. To try out the display I connected it to the PIC microcontroller ( MSSP module ) on my prototyping board, and ran some code to measure and display temperature and voltage. The bus speed I chose was 1MBit/s.
The display lacks a built-in font. But that was quickly remedied by finding a ASCII character set 5x7pixel font file online, and including it as a header file in my C-code.

Nokia 5110 LCD with white back-light in use

I was disappointed with the blue back-lit display being hard to read, despite spending a lot of time experimenting with contrast, bias and temperature coefficient settings. The white back-light variant is much better in this respect.
I found the display very easy to use; now ready for a suitable future project.
( Click on images to zoom ).
MSSP = Master Synchronous Serial Port, DDRAM = Display Data RAM