i couldnt find the sda and scl output pins..i dont know will it work with i2c..but there is i2c output on pic controller..the schematic not showing the pins correctly..i couldnt understand.

I just purchased this, and have a working PIC18F2550 proto board. But when I send data all I see are strange vertical bar patterns (similar to a pair of '|' very close together) instead of characters. One of these patterns (looks like a custom character) appears each time I send a char to the display. My PicBasic code is very simple. I'm running a 4 Mhz osc.

Pause 3000  
PORTB.0 = 1
SEROUT PORTB.1,6,["a"] 'the 6 sets 9600 baud 
Pause 1000
PORTB.0 = 0
SEROUT PORTB.1,6,["m"]

I bought this Serial LCD display from Microcenter for my Arduino and ended up playing around with it in Windows using LCD Smartie and it works pretty nice. In order to drive the LCD display, you will need to purchase a FTDI breakout or cable that also provides +5VDC

I'm using the following: LCD Smartie: http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/ Fryar's Sparkfun SerLCD driver: http://lcdsmartie.fryar.org/serlcd.php FTDI Breakout: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9716

Connect the Red lead to +5v on the breakout, the black lead goes to GND, and the yellow lead goes to the TX pin of the breakout (Breakout TX to LCD's RX).

Fire up LCD Smartie and in the right hand corner, specify Sparkfun.dll and adjust your comms. parameters as needed. Restart Smartie and it should work.

The only down side is that the driver won't always update if you're actively making changes to the "screens" that LCD Smartie shows. To fix, just restart LCD Smartie after your changes and you're good to go. This is a pretty cheap solution to giving a headless server a LCD display for stats monitoring and it works very well. The only way it could get cheaper is with a parallel port-based HD44780 display of the same size.

Alternatively, if you are wanting to just play around with the LCD itself and you have an Arduino but no spare FTDI chip, you can do this by putting the Arduino into shutdown (load an empty sketch) and then attach the yellow lead to TX on the Arduino (pin 1). This will allow your computer to talk to the display using the FTDI programmer as a simple serial port to try it out.

Absolutely none of the examples work out of the box anymore. NewSoftwareSerial has been incorporated into arduino proper, but of course they changed it when they did so, so none of the examples on the Internet actually, you know, work. This is pretty confusing to a beginner.

Just a little advice if you plan to use this with an Arduino. If you are using the NewSoftSerial library to control the display and you are also going to control a servo with the Arduino, don't use the normal Arduino servo library. It is not compatible with the NewSoftSerial library. If you are going to use NewSoftSerial, try using PWMServo instead.

In the datasheet it says to set the splash screen send the special charter 124 followed by "j". What is ? I haven't been able to get this to work.

some questions: 1) can this be inserted to a breadboard and then plugged into an arduino to be conrtolled
2) does this product need building

Is there an updated schematic for this version? The current link is for v2.

The packaging in the image says this display is White on Black... Is this true?? or is it just a stock image and I could really get any color??

"This is the latest evolution of our serial LCD."
What has been changed since the last version?

Is there a reason why you still fail to support the definition of the custom characters? They are great for graphs, progress bars etc.