In my diploma thesis in 2002 I had to program a firmware for, let’s say a prepaid solar charger (sounds strange, but that was the idea). It was based on an MSP430 by TI, which is a very cool, ultra low power microcontroller. The problem was, that we had so many things to do with the MCU that free pins were almost not available. This lead to all kinds of workarounds, one of them beeing us using shift registers whereever possible. One of those cases was the LCD display. A standard 8 bit data bus, 16×2 chars display.Programming this one via shift registers was not exactly fun.
6 years forward, there’s a few new kids on the block. One of them is the pretty cool DOG-M series by Electronic Assembly, which is not quite cheap, very easy to integrate (because it almost looks like a Glass version of a large IC, so, it has pins), but also has a very cool extra: It has an SPI mode where you only need 4 pins (6 if you count GND and Vcc). When I found those suckers in the catalogue of my favorite electronics supplier, I could not resist and ordered one.
Well, the first display lasted about 2 days. When I tried to remove it from my breadboard, I learned the hard way that the glass housing has it’s drawbacks.
The second display got it’s own small PCB to live on, and is now added to my projects as I see fit.
The next problem (after solving the hardware, uhm, problems) was the software. Interfacing the display was relatively easy. I wrote some utility functions and it was pretty usable. But on second thought, beeing able to use it in the same, easy way as with the arduino LCDLibrary would be much better.
