What ever you do, stay away from the 117 series serial controllers such as the one sold by ModernDevice.com. It uses a PIC chip written by some guy.
The 'some guy' is Peter Anderson. Just to set the record straight this should probably be the board/chip of choice if you decide to use a serial LCD interface. His was the first of the serial LCD modules available, it's been around for more than a decade, and is the most widely available. That means that you are more likely to find code examples written for this chip than for any others.
Its closed source ...
That is about the only disadvantage.
.. and it does NOT understand standard Carriage Return and Line Feed, you have to send odd chars such as "?R" for a return and "?N" for line feed.
The LCD controller itself does not inherently understand 'carriage return', 'line feed' or any other ASCII control codes. All LCD implementations, serial, I2C, parallel, or tin cans with string, must convert some special code you send them into the appropriate cursor control codes.
Unfortunately there are MANY boards that use this cpu
I would call this fortunate for the reasons mentioned above.
...and it doesnt understand standard ASCII
Then how does it display any text strings that you send it.
All that having been said, there are other boards out there that may be better for a specific application. I myself would look for one that can also understand I2C, a protocol that probably didn't exist when Peter wrote his original code. The trade off is that you will be more or less on your own since it will be a lot harder to find code examples for these newer implementations.
Don