Creation of the Title Picture

I've been dinking around with LCDs controlled with an Hitachi HD44780 LCD Controller. You can purchase one at Sparkfun, of course. As a matter of fact, here is the model I used for the picture above.

I've used the Matrix Orbital serial and usb LCDs before and found them to be very easy to use and implement in a project like Junkbot. The downside to Matrix Orbital LCDs is two-fold. First, there is a price. For $14, I got the LCD from Sparkfun. Comparitively, the same LCD with a serial backpack from Matrix Orbital may cost from $80 to $100. Second, you are limited to using Matrix Orbital's implementation of the serial interconnect. This isn't that big of an issue, but sometimes one just may want low level access to their human interaction interfaces.

However, in order to use the HD44780 controlled LCD, I had to write my own driver for my Atmega8 in order to support the display. This proved to be an interesting project and it took me an afternoon of trial and error. Luckily, there is a ton of information out on the internets about the HD44780 controlled LCD.