OK now that we're clear about what type of LCD we're talking about, its time to also look at the different shapes they come in.

Although they display only text, they do come in many shapes: from top left we have a 20x4 with white text on blue background, a 16x4 with black text on green, 16x2 with white text on blue and a 16x1 with black text on gray.

The good news is that all of these displays are 'swappable' - if you build your project with one you can unplug it and use another size. Your code may have to adjust to the larger size but at least the wiring is the same!

For this part of the tutorial, we'll be using LCDs with a single strip of 16 pins as shown above. There are also some with 2 lines of 8 pins like so:

These are much harder to breadboard. If you want some help in wiring these up, check out this page.