Lunar Tech Misadventures 004
Making a Nokia 5110 display work with an ATmega8A microcontroller.

Introduction

I first got into AVRs in middle school where we had a robotics club. We learned the basics of C and binary operators. That's where I have the ATmega8As from actually.

Recently I thought that, after 2 semesters of learning C++ in university (it was hell), maybe it's time to dive into microcontrollers again. I attempted to use Rust with AVRs before but IIRC I'd need to use unsafe blocks everywhere so I gave up on that. And it just so happened that I have a Nokia 5110 display that I randomly bought when I was shopping for other stuff at some point.

Oh, yeah, and the project I want to make is a sort of weather station thing? Like clock + thermometer + humidity sensor. That was inspired by the fact that the air in my room can be very dry sometimes and I wanted to be able to measure how dry exactly it is.

About The Display

So the Nokia 5110 display is a pretty cool thing. You can buy boards with standard 2.54mm pins connected to it quite easily and cheapily. It's a monochromatic LCD, with blue backlight. It uses a PCD8544 controller. It uses an SPI-like serial protocol for communication. In the sense that it has an input line but no output line.

You can get a datasheet for the controller but good luck getting a datasheet for the actual display itself.