Driving the LCD - share your experience

Hi! So, I've been working on the software for this challenge and have reached the point where i need to figure out the LCD. The datasheet has a character map and and the addresses for the position of each character. I don't have much experience with driving LCDs so I'm struggling with where to start. Have any of you figured out the LCD yet?

I found a couple threads on the arduino forum that talk about this display, with people saying you could use the HD44780 libraries, or similar to drive it. I'll be trying that with an arduino board first, but still would like to hear about your experience with this display so far.

Thank you!

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JWx over 1 year ago

I think that HD44780 is pretty standard, but - as you have written - driven mainly from small MCUs

Here is some example of using from Raspberry Pi:

https://tutorials-raspberrypi.com/raspberry-pi-lcd-display-16x2-characters-display-hd44780/?utm_content=cmp-true

didn't tried it but looks as one would expect it to look...
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Anthocyanina over 1 year ago in reply to JWx

Thanks! yeah, the thing is, the LCD from the kit doesn't use an HD44780, but the arduino forum posts i found mention it could be driven as if it was the HD44780. This LCD doesn't appear to be commonly used by hobbyists, so there isn't much out there on practical implementations of drivers for it
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Anthocyanina over 1 year ago in reply to JWx

Thanks! yeah, the thing is, the LCD from the kit doesn't use an HD44780, but the arduino forum posts i found mention it could be driven as if it was the HD44780. This LCD doesn't appear to be commonly used by hobbyists, so there isn't much out there on practical implementations of drivers for it
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JWx over 1 year ago in reply to Anthocyanina

ok - sorry, I have only today got my kit so I didn't check the documentation yet.

AFAIK HD44780 is considered some sort of standard, with many compatible chipsets. Our LCD seems to be based on/compatible with RW1063 ("For full design functionality, please use this specification in conjunction with the RW1063 specification. (Provided Separately)") - but, according to the datasheet, this driver is 2x8 character max, so maybe some variation of it is installed.

RW1063 seems to have many interfaces: parallel 4b/8b, serial SPI and I2C, of which our module uses I2C

https://www.crystalfontz.com/controllers/datasheet-viewer.php?id=227

https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/HD44780.pdf

After quick checking, RW1063 parallel interface looks similar to HD44780, so there is a good chance it can be driven with I2C HD44780 Arduino library...
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