The HD44780 is one of the first chips we learned about as a kid, and chances are good you’ve used one in your project at some point, and almost certain that you’ve interacted with one in your life. The character LCD is ubiquitous, easy to interface, and very robust. They come in sizes from 8 x 1 to 20 x 4 and even larger, but they almost all have the same pinout, and there are libraries in many embedded environments for interacting with them. [The 8-Bit Guy] decided to interface with one using just switches and a button, (YouTube, embedded) with the intent of illustrating exactly how to use them, and how easy they are.
If you’ve never used a character LCD before and want a great introduction to them, this is the video for you. It turns out that there’s no clock to worry about, and the instruction set is easily discerned from a datasheet table. [The 8-Bit Guy] even gets fancy with additional commands.
These displays have featured quite frequently here at Hackaday. Just a couple of many are this serial drive hack using a PIC microcontroller, and exploiting the custom characters to create non-character graphics.
Thanks [emuboy] for the tip.
Filed under: how-to, parts
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