Calling this the “Serial Enabled LCD Kit” doesn’t do justice to how cool it actually is. After you’ve assembled this all-PTH kit, you’ll be left with a fully Arduino-compatible development board that just happens to have a white on black 16x2 display built-in.
Turns out the ATMega328 is pretty far over-spec for just controlling a parallel LCD so there’s a lot of horsepower left over to do whatever else needs to be done. We’ve broken out all of the unused GPIO pins to 0.1" headers on one side of the board, making this more than just a great kit for beginner soldering but also an awesome development tool for experienced programmers.
In order to upload new code to the LCD Kit via bootloader you’ll need an FTDI Basic Breakout and have the Board setting in Arduino on ‘Arduino Duemilanove w/ ATmega328.’ The uC comes pre-programmed with the SerialLCD firmware on top of the bootloader, so if you just want to use it as a serial-enabled LCD, you won’t need to do any programming.
Check the github page below for instructions on how to use the kit. The source code is also hosted over there, if you want to take a look.
Documents
- Schematic
- Eagle Files
- Assembly and Getting Started Guide
- Datasheet
- GitHub (Firmware & Design Files)
- Example Code
