LCD1602 Display module

DC Motors and L293D Transistor

74HC595 Shift Register and LEDs

LCD1602 module is a display that has an LED backlight and can display two rows with up to 16 characters on each row. You can see the rectangles for each character on the display and the pixels that make up each character. The display is just white on blue and is intended for showing text.

Lining up the display with the top of the breadboard helps to identify its pins without too much counting, especially if the breadboard has its rows numbered with row 1 as the top row of the board. Do not forget, the long yellow lead that links the slider of the pot to pin 3 of the display. The 'pot' is used to control the contrast of the display.

In this project you will learn how to control a small DC motor using a Mega board and a L293D transistor, which is a very useful chip. It can actually control two motors independently. We are just using half the chip in this lesson, most of the pins on the right hand side of the chip are for controlling a second motor.

L293D is quadruple high-current half-H drivers and designed to provide bidirectional drive currents of up to 1 A at voltages from 4.5 V to 36 V. The L293D is also designed to provide bidirectional drive currents of up to 600-mA at voltages from 4.5 V to 36 V and drive inductive loads such as relays, solenoids, dc and bipolar stepping motors, as well as other high-current/high-voltage loads in positive-supply applications.

74HC595 is a Serial to Parallel Converter which has eight outputs (perfect) and three inputs that you use to feed data into it a bit at a time.

This chip makes it a little slower to drive the LEDs (you can only change the LEDs about 500,000 times a second instead of 8,000,000 a second) but it's still really fast, way faster than humans can detect, so it's worth it!

74HC595 shift register is a type of chip that holds what can be thought of as eight memory locations, each of which can either be a 1 or a 0. To set each of these values on or off, we feed in the data using the 'Data' and 'Clock' pins of the chip.

Component List

Applicable Age: 12+

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