How to Interface the 8051 MCU with an LCD Display

Danielle Gruber
17 min readJan 21, 2022

In this tutorial, we’ll interface the 8051 microcontroller with an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and display a blinking “Hello World” message.

Table of contents

· Table of contents
· Introduction
· Hardware setup
Components
· Understanding the LCD
LCD pins
LCD registers
LCD memory
Other
· Using the control pins
Timing of the write cycle
Putting it all together
· Assembly refresher
For loops
Infinite loops
Subroutines
· Code breakdown
Assigning symbolic names
Define data and commands
Define delay subroutine
Define subroutines to send data and commands to LCD
Define byte-looping subroutine
Define main program
Full code
· About the author
· Sources cited and further reading

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Danielle Gruber

👋 I am a junior at Yale University majoring in electrical engineering. I’m interested in neuroscience, computer science, math, and everything in between!