HD44780 Text LCD Greets Totoro
The HD44780 controller is a very common little chip that acts as the brains behind little character-based displays. These displays are every, every, everywhere - the gas station down the street from my house has them in the gas pumps and the cash registers, our new printer/scanner uses one, and I'd bet my eyeteeth that the little glowy displays in modern pay phones are driven by a very similar chip. Srsly. If you spend some time out and about in a well-settled part of any developed nation these days, you're bound to encounter several of them. There may well be some in your home, especially if you're a gadget freak.
I think the HD44780 is mid-eighties tech. They're not as flexible and fancy as graphic LCD controllers, but most applications don't need much. The HD44780 and its clones usually come with the English alphabet built in, as well as punctuation, numbers, and the Japanese katakana syllabary. There are also a few umlauted letters, Greek letters, and symbols - even an ñ! Scroll down a bit on this page to see the whole gang.
Code for using these displays is very easy to find on microcontroller hobbyist sites, but I wrote my own - as a software guy, I consider that the fun part. This picture shows a display I recently bought on eBay for about $11. It has an odd greenish-yellow backlight, which accounts for the lemon-lime background color. The display area is about 1x3 inches. I've just managed to get my interface code for it working - I've been using these for years, but with a different fambly of microcontrollers, and have just now gotten around to writing the code for the AVR MCUs. Now that I have it going, what can I not achieve?
The text extends a greeting to the almost-absurdly-beloved Japanese cartoon character Totoro, whose name is one of the few katakana words I know. (I highly recommend the movie My Neighbor Totoro. If you haven't seen it, check it out - it's beautiful, beautiful work and one of the sweetest films I've ever seen.)
カワイイ!
HD44780 Text LCD Greets Totoro
The HD44780 controller is a very common little chip that acts as the brains behind little character-based displays. These displays are every, every, everywhere - the gas station down the street from my house has them in the gas pumps and the cash registers, our new printer/scanner uses one, and I'd bet my eyeteeth that the little glowy displays in modern pay phones are driven by a very similar chip. Srsly. If you spend some time out and about in a well-settled part of any developed nation these days, you're bound to encounter several of them. There may well be some in your home, especially if you're a gadget freak.
I think the HD44780 is mid-eighties tech. They're not as flexible and fancy as graphic LCD controllers, but most applications don't need much. The HD44780 and its clones usually come with the English alphabet built in, as well as punctuation, numbers, and the Japanese katakana syllabary. There are also a few umlauted letters, Greek letters, and symbols - even an ñ! Scroll down a bit on this page to see the whole gang.
Code for using these displays is very easy to find on microcontroller hobbyist sites, but I wrote my own - as a software guy, I consider that the fun part. This picture shows a display I recently bought on eBay for about $11. It has an odd greenish-yellow backlight, which accounts for the lemon-lime background color. The display area is about 1x3 inches. I've just managed to get my interface code for it working - I've been using these for years, but with a different fambly of microcontrollers, and have just now gotten around to writing the code for the AVR MCUs. Now that I have it going, what can I not achieve?
The text extends a greeting to the almost-absurdly-beloved Japanese cartoon character Totoro, whose name is one of the few katakana words I know. (I highly recommend the movie My Neighbor Totoro. If you haven't seen it, check it out - it's beautiful, beautiful work and one of the sweetest films I've ever seen.)
カワイイ!