This 7:1 Scale 16x2 Character LCD Is a Thing of Beauty

I couldn’t begin to guess at the psychology behind it, but we sure do love big versions of mundane items. Half the tourism marketing around the world seems to focus on a town’s gigantic rocking chair or ball of twine. Electronics tend to get left out of the fun, so UncleStem addressed that oversight by building this fully functional 7:1 scale version of a classic 16×2 character LCD.

Because you’re a Hackster reader, I think it is safe to assume you’re familiar with LCDs of this style. Instead of a uniform matrix of pixels that you can control individually, they give you a bunch of seven-segment displays packed into a single screen. And they’re usually very easy to work with, because you only need to tell them what characters you want to appear.

However, that simplicity is also what made this project a challenge for UncleStem. He couldn’t simply scale everything up, because an LCD panel isn’t the kind of thing one can realistically fabricate at home.

Instead, UncleStem chose to retain the appearance of the 16×2 character LCD, but with completely different technology under the hood. His embiggened display relies on LEDs, with a dedicated LED for each and every pixel. Each character requires 35 pixels and there are 32 characters in total, so that works out to a whopping 1,120 LEDs in total.

Those are TX1812EXA-F10-E LEDs from TCWIN. They’re individually addressable RGB LEDs, very similar to the popular WS2812B, but in a much smaller package size (3.5×3.5mm, compared to 5×5mm). The small size let UncleStem fit them into the available area on custom PCBs, with one PCB for each character.

The LED data lines are all daisy-chained. So, after painstaking assembly, UncleStem could simply connect all of the PCBs together. An Arduino Nano board (later replaced with a Wavehare RP2040-Zero) tells them what to do and indexing was straightforward, with an offset of 35 addresses per character.

UncleStem then mounted the PCBs on a wood base, with 3D-printed dividers keeping the LED light contained. Finally, a blue acrylic panel with a glued-on paper diffuser created the distinct LCD appearance. A 3D-printed shell topped it all off and UncleStem even added gargantuan header pins that actually connect the microcontroller to the LEDs.

The result looks fantastic is the perfect companion to UncleStem’s oversized Arduino UNO.