The commonly used 16×2 LCD can also display custom made characters besides numbers, alphabets & special characters. Any character can be made to appear on a 5×8 pixel matrix element without knowledge of its ASCII value. The idea explained here demonstrates the principle and operation of a simple LCD custom character display using 8051 microcontroller (AT89C51). When the ASCII code for any character, say ‘A’, is sent to be displayed on LCD module, the module’s controller looks up the appropriate 5×8-pixel pattern in ROM (read-only memory) and displays that pattern on the LCD. There are 8 symbol locations where a custom character can be stored as shown in the following right table. These locations will have a particular bitmap layout corresponding to the custom character. To display an arrow sign, the bitmap values are mapped to a base address location, say 64 (ASCII code 0).