runningdude22:
I bought the 1602 LCD recently and I'm trying to figure out what serial adapters I need to get it to work without a bazillion wires. Any suggestions?
Shift registers are an easy and cheap option (and most people have a ton of shift register chips laying around). They would use from 2 to 4 wires depending on what shift register you have and how much complexity you build into the control circuit. If you want to use the lowest number of wires, I2C is a good option. But, I believe that's slower than using shift registers for LCD displays (been about a year but I believe that's the case).
Tim