In the Previous installment of the picaxe primer, I said we would turn our attention toward interfacing our Master Processor with inexpensive LCD displays based on the Hitachi HD44780 controller (for more info, see "Getting Started with PICAXE Microcontrollers, Part 2" in the Feb. 2007 issue of Nuts & Volts). These displays are easy to work with and they can be extremely useful in a variety of projects. We will be focusing on four specific Hantronix displays (see Figure 1) that I chose because they are inexpensive ($5 to $10) and have pin-outs that are fairly easy to adapt to the construction of stripboard circuits. The displays are available at www.Mouser.com; go to their site and enter the Hantronix part number from Figure 1 to get pricing information and to download the datasheets. While in future installments of the Primer we'll develop stripboard circuits for each of the display sizes (16×2 and 8×2), this month we'll focus on simplifying the interface between our Master Processor board and both sizes of the parallel displays.
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