The LCD117 serial LCD board interfaces any HD44780-based LCD (this is the vast majority of LCD’s you will encounter) with a three-wire serial interface, consisting of ground, +5 volts, and serial data. The board uses a programmed PIC chip, created by Maryland EE professor Peter Anderson, to convert serial commands, e.g. Serial.print(“Modern Device”), into LCD text.
Peter Anderson’s command set is very robust and complete, with commands to control the backlight and address 8 custom characters that are available for user interfaces.
I programmed a custom character generator, for doing the slightly confusing math necessary to generate custom characters, which is also available below.

I guess there needs to be a caveat in here. The kit will accommodate the vast majority of LCD’s. There are a number of pinouts, which are thankfully very rare, that require remapping the pins. Mostly this involves the backlight pins, which for some reason are (rarely) found on the pin 1 end of the data pins instead of the pin 14 end, which is vastly more common, and is the way that the kit is laid out. It is a good idea to confirm the pinout of your LCD with the pinout listed in the instructions before plugging it in. If you can’t get your LCD datasheet however, just plug it in and try it, the overwhelming odds are that it will work fine.

The assembled board also includes two different backlight resistors, which can vary from display to display. Some choice of backlight resistor will need to be soldered in, if your LCD has a backlight and you wish to use it. Some LCD’s have enough resistance built in so shunts (eg resistor leads) can be useful too. The kit also includes a handy three conductor cable to hook up the display to the driver board.

Package Contents

• Assembled LCD117 Serial Driver Board
• 15 ohm and 27 ohm backlight resistors
• 12" three conductor cable with two female ends for connecting the LCD board to a microcontroller
• Three pin double male header for easy breadboard interface

Specifications

• three-wire interface (5V, GND and serial data)
• 1×16 & 2×8 headers to interface the overwhelming majority of LCDs
• robust command set, including software control
• three unused pins are brought out to pads, and are under software control as general purpose
  input/output

Buying Options

• LCD117 Kit
• LCD117 Assembled
• LCD117 Kit & 16 × 2 Blue LCD Package
• LCD117 Kit & 20 × 4 Blue LCD Package
• LCD117 Assembled & 16×2 Blue Turnkey Package
• LCD117 Assembled & 20×4 Blue Turnkey Package

Resources

• LCD117 Command Summary, pdf
• LCD117 command summary, MS Word
• LCD117 LCD Kit Instructions
• LCD Demo for the Arduino language
• LCD Custom Character Generator