Dimming LCD Backlight
Presented here is an LCD power-saving backlight-control circuit. An LCD is used in many projects for indication or information display since it consumes less power and, hence, saves energy. But power consumption in an LCD backlight draws a lot of attention. Pin diagram of a 16×2 alphanumeric LCD is shown in Fig. below: Pins 15 and 16 are internally connected to the backlight LED. Normally, backlight LED+ is connected to +5V supply via a current-limiting resistor (it is not included in the circuit here for simplicity). But this LED stays on, all the time. So if you want to dim it, you need a solution so that during day time, or when ambient light is enough to make the LCD characters visible, the backlight gets dimmed and energy can be saved. For this, we have two options: one is microcontroller (MCU) based and the other is discrete-component based. Circuit using an LCD is generally driven by an MCU. If the MCU has capture-compare pulse (CCP) width modulation module, our task becomes ver...