I really like the Adafruit LCD Backpack, but I’ve been wanting to play around with adjusting the LCD backlight brightness programatically. After much mulling and reading of forum posts, I decided to just operate the backlight using one extra wire to a PWM pin on the Arduino. To try and keep things tidy, I ordered some extra 3-pin terminal blocks so I could make a 6-pin block instead of the normal 5-pin block. Just to up the stakes, I’m doing this with my brand new 20×4 LCD.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
