Create Your Custom Character for LCD in Arduino

Was working on my wife’s Sparkfun Red Board. I had bought for her birthday 🎂. I think I am having more fun with it than her.

The first thing I wanted to do was to write I ♥ U on the LCD, to show my lovely wife how an awesome thing the Arduino board is.

So the secret is creating a byte array. And using createChar() which is a method of the LiquidCrystal library that Arduino.

#include <LiquidCrystal.h> 

LiquidCrystal lcd(12,11,5,4,3,2); // make some custom characters: 
byte heart[8] = { 0b00000, 0b01010, 
                  0b11111, 0b11111, 
                  0b11111, 0b01110, 
                  0b00100, 0b00000 
                 }; 
byte smile[8] = { 0b00000, 0b00100,
                  0b10010, 0b00001,
                  0b10001, 0b00010,
                  0b00100, 0b00000 
                 }; 

void setup() { 
    lcd.createChar(1, heart);
    lcd.createChar(2, smile);
    lcd.begin(16, 2); 
    //lcd.clear(); 
    lcd.print("I ");
    lcd.write(1);
    lcd.print(" U");
    lcd.write(2);
} 
void loop() {
    lcd.setCursor(0,1);
    lcd.print(millis()/1000);
}

Have fun!