hello, I have seen many Liquid Crystal tutorials, and all of them include a 3 pin potentiometer, in my kit I have something that seems to be a potentiometer but has 5 pins, (GND, +, SW, DT, CLK), it is also clickable, is there an option to use the potentiometer I have with liquid crystal display?
thanks!
What you have sounds like a rotary encoder. It will not replace a potentiometer. I have found that a 1K resistor from LCD pin 3 to ground gives good contrast.
I concur. What you have is indeed, a rotary encoder.
Using a potentiometer to control the LCD contrast is a minor blunder that has been inherited over many amateur designs (and no doubt, a few professional ones) using the HD44780 LCD controller and its derivatives. In fact, the correct way to control the contrast is to use a variable resistor between pin 3 and ground, and the appropriate resistance value will generally be between zero and 1k.
A variable resistor is a potentiometer with only one end and the wiper connected. If you use a 10k potentiometer, it actually functions better if you connect both ends to ground and the wiper to pin 3 of the LCD. But if you simply try a few ordinary resistors in value between none (just connect pin 3 to ground) and 1k, you should find an optimum value.