An LCD Interface for PC-Based Robots

Posted 14 Jan 2007 at 18:04 UTC by steve

Need to connect an alphanumeric LCD display panel to your PC-based robot? Till Harbaum has created LCD2USB for just that purpose. It's a combination of Open Hardware and Free Software that allows you to cotrol HD44780 type LCD displays from the USB port of any Linux-based motherboard. A Freshmeat announcement today describes the latest version of the project which now includes a completely GPL'd USB stack. The USB interface is implemented in software on an Atmel AVR to minimize the cost of the hardware. On the Linux side, the project relies on code from the LCD4Linux project, which is a great starting place if you're looking for ways to connect some other type of LCD panel to your Linux-based robot (there are several other Linux LCD interface projects as well).