I2C_LiquidCrystal_RUS

🌐 English | Русский

Arduino library that adds Cyrillic (Russian) and Kazakh-specific character support to I2C/parallel character LCDs. It extends LiquidCrystal_I2C (I2C wiring) or the standard LiquidCrystal library (10-pin wiring) with UTF-8 decoding and on-the-fly custom-glyph loading, so lcd.print("Привет") or lcd.print("Әлем") renders correctly on a 16x2/20x4 HD44780-style display that has no built-in Cyrillic character set.

Why this exists

Standard HD44780 LCD controllers ship with a Japanese/Western character ROM — there is no Cyrillic, and no Kazakh-specific letters (Ә, І, Ң, Ғ, Ү, Ұ) at all. This library works around that by:

• Decoding incoming UTF-8 text to Unicode code points.
• Mapping visually-identical Cyrillic letters (А, В, Е, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, Х, …) to their existing Latin glyphs in the LCD's built-in ROM.
• For the remaining ~50 Cyrillic and Kazakh letters that have no Latin look-alike, generating an 8x8 bitmap on the fly and loading it into one of the LCD's 8 programmable CGRAM character slots, reusing slots as the visible text scrolls.

Requirements

• LiquidCrystal_I2C library installed (for I2C wiring), or the built-in Arduino LiquidCrystal library (for direct 10-pin wiring).

Usage

You must #define _LCD_TYPE before including the library — the build fails with a clear error otherwise.

// 1 = I2C wiring, 2 = direct 10-pin wiring
#define _LCD_TYPE 1

#include <I2C_LiquidCrystal_RUS.h>

I2C_LiquidCrystal_RUS lcd(0x27, 16, 2); // I2C address, columns, rows

void setup() {
  lcd.init();
  lcd.backlight();
  lcd.setCursor(0, 0);
  lcd.print("Привет, мир!");
}

void loop() {}

Pin reference:

Board	SDA	SCL
Arduino Uno/Nano	A4	A5
ESP8266	D2 (4)	D1 (5)
ESP8266-01	0	2
ESP32	21	22

Examples

• HelloWorld_I2C / HelloWorld_without_I2C — minimal init + print
• Custom_I2C_example / Custom_without_i2c_example — custom character slots
• I2C_scanner — find your display's I2C address
• SerialToLCD_I2C / SerialToLCD_without_i2c — echo Serial input to the display
• With_I2C_2Displays — driving two displays at once

Other Arduino libraries from Alash-electronics

github.com/Alash-electronics