How do you drive a Serial LCD?

[Mike, K8LH]

Hi Dwight (and gang),

If you're interested... I just finished testing the upgrade to the 8-pin PIC serial LCD interface and it works great. The mod involved adding an RC integrator/filter (10K + 330pF) between the GP0/D4 pin and the LCD RS pin. Now I can drive all six LCD control pins directly from the little 8-pin PIC which means I can collect serial data, analyze it, and write data to the LCD display any way I want. In short, you should be able to feed the serial interface using the DEBUG, SEROUT2 or HSEROUT commands with all of the same formatting parameters you're using now with the LCDOUT command. I'm pretty geeked (yes, I'm a nerd - LOL).

If anyone is interested, I'll start a new thread in the 'schematic' sub-forum after characterizing and testing the firmware. The only real advantages I can think of for this interface is its size (very small footprint on a project board when using the 2x5 header for a MikroE LCD Adapter board) and its ability to drive four lines of a switch matrix (one additional pin on the host can read four switches, an encoder, etc.).

Cheers, Happy Holidays, Mike