How to control Serial LCD

Components & Accessories Displays
1

I purchased a serial LCD from Sparkfun and have been following along with the guide. It works great and the examples work with the LCD.

I’m a bit confused on the methods I can use to control it though. I understand that I can control it by writing new code and then uploading that to my Arduino, but can I also control it over the serial monitor? I tried sending instructions by pressing send in serial monitor but not really sure what i’m doing and would love some guidance.

Thanks in advance

Sam

2

Hi Sam.

The Serial Monitor isn’t going to be much use if you want to control the display directly from your computers serial port. The Serial Monitor in Arduino will only allow you to send text, and the display is looking for control characters sent in HEX.

We don’t have a guide for it, but you’re going to need a different bit of software for sending anything more than just text to the display. I recommend a serial terminal program called [HTerm for something like this, it allows you to construct a string to send that contains Ascii text and HEX or decimal commands all on the same line and then send that all at once out the serial port.

There’s also another serial terminal program called [RealTerm that allows sending HEX data that would also work but it’s not as flexible as HTerm.](RealTerm: Serial/TCP Terminal download | SourceForge.net)](HTerm - der-hammer)

3

Thanks for the info! I was unsure if I was using my LCD the wrong way, but this clears it up. Honestly I prefer writing text with code.

Thanks