I planning to use a hitachi compatible LCD 16x2 with the LiquidCrystal lib
It just works. However I am wondering something.
We have not decided which side we will mount the overall solution, it depends on various factors.
I am currently deisgning the arduino shield embedding this LCD screen among other things.
It may sound silly but some of my users may want to mount my solution upside down and complain the text is therefore upside down too. Can i display text upside down too ?
I have been looking in the lib specs but i have not found where you can ask for text being displayed upside down.
.. it will not only be upside down, but also left and right will be exchanged.
So the characters must be flipped both vertically and horizontally (rotated 180 degrees) to be viewed with the display upside down and they also have to be sent in reverse order.
You can't do that with the built-in generic characters.
You can however, make custom characters that would be upside down. The problem is that, you can only have 8 custom characters at any given time.
If the display update rate is really slow, it might be practical. But if you will be changing text often and at a high update rate, you will be spending all of the processing time creating custom characters within the display and accessing them.
Also consider the fact that each character requires 7 to 8 bytes. If you need all 26 characters and say, 15 punctuation characters, that'll be 328 bytes of FLASH storage, just to store them.
Another alternative is to use a graphic LCD and have the display flipped when it is mounted the "wrong way".
But as I have no experience with graphic displays (yet), I don't know how many bytes would be needed to implement that feature on top of your main application.