Embedded Lab

A varieties of serial LCDs from different manufacturers are available in the market. But if you are good at PIC programming you can make one by yourself. The most popular and low cost LCDs for embedded projects are HD44780 based character LCD modules. They are parallel LCDs because they recieve display data from microcontrollers in parallel format. Their interface require at least 6 I/O pins of a microcontroller. By including an additional microcontroller to your HD44780 LCD module you can convert it to a serial LCD. The idea is very simple. The extra controller will receive the display data from the host microcontroller in a serial format and provide it to the LCD module in an appropriate parallel format. With the new LCD module, you would be able to send the display data with just one wire.

Here’s a project that uses a PIC16F88 microcontroller working as a display controller for serial to parallel conversion of display data. The demonstrating software is written in C and compiled with mikroC.

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