I'm doing a project involving and lcd and i have never interfaced one with arduino before. I want an lcd with three pins +, - and and an info wire. I'm and also on a budget. Please, any ideas will help.
I want an lcd with three pins +, - and and an info wire. I'm and also on a budget.
Generally speaking, an LCD with a serial interface (which is what I suspect you're thinking of) is going to be more expensive than an LCD with a parallel interface. You can sometimes find parallel LCDs with the standard HD44780 controller for $3-4 at places like Electronic Goldmine.
The disadvantage of a parallel LCD is that you'll either have to use a lot of pins to connect it or add a bit of external circuitry. If you have the I2C pins available, you can interface a parallel LCD using just those two pins and one additional chip - an I2C I/O expander. If you're already using other I2C devices, no additional I/O lines are required if you use this method.
You can find an application note describing various interfaces for a parallel LCD, including the I2C interface mentioned above, on the ZBasic Application Notes page. The example code is written in ZBasic but the concepts are easily translated.
After posting this i found this circuit which take the lcd pins and moves it down to three. Just to make sure, i need the serial enabled lcd and the backpack right. The picture of a serial enabled lcd shows the backpack already on it. Thanks.
There are also inexpensive parallel to serial LCD "piggyback" cards here: Displays – Modern Device
With this you take any HD44780 LCD, add this piggyback board to it, then control it via simple serial commands. On the Aruino that would be either the TX line or some other port via SoftSerial. (So its a one wire interface.)
It works very well, and allows you to convert a "bargain" board from goldmine or allelectronics to a Serial interface.
There are also companies, like SparkFun Electronics that sell LCD with Serial piggybacks pre-installed for around 16-30 depending on the screen size.
I would recommend a serial enabled LCD from sparkfun.
3 wires.
Easy to control, by just sending the text you want to display on it over the serial port.
Or a similar LCD backpack from Wulfden or Modern Device
http://wulfden.org/TheShoppe/k107/k107-51.jpg
http://moderndevice.com/Images/LCDpop800.jpg
Thanks so much, great exactly what i need.
jm4648 is a seller on ebay.. I have nothing to do with him except I love the fact can purchase an lcd complete with a serial backpack already on it for $15 shipped... try searching serial lcd and see what shows up... I have bought from him and they have all worked great!!!