SerLCD controlled by PIC16 via UART

Components & Accessories Displays
1

I ordered the SparkFun 20x4 SerLCD to use for a PIC16 microcontroller project. I’m using the PIC16F to squire some sensor data, and want to display the data to the LCD.

I have the LCD powered through my PIC debugger, and have a single wire going from the serial RX1 pin of the SerLCD to the UART transmit pin of my PIC16F1619 controller. I’ve got everything on the PIC side configured through the IDE configurator.

Now, I’m a bit lost as how to send commands to the SerLCD controller from the PIC16. I’ve dug around the Arduino libraries, but as this is my first embedded project, I’m unsure of how to adapt the Arduino code for PIC16.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for sending characters from the PIC16F over UART to the SerLCD?

Thanks for reading!

2

Greetings. Thank you for posting on the SparkFun forums!

I am not super familiar with PIC, however, I think I can try and assist you here.

I presume you are using the 5v version of the 20x4 serLCD LCD-09568? This device should default to 9600 baud and any characters you send via this baud rte should show up on the screen assuming the contrast is setup appropriately. If you have a USB to serial converter you can try using a serial terminal and see if the screen is functioning without the PIC variable first.

As fr as sending UART characters from the PIC16 goes, there seems to be plenty of tutorials on the web that should help. Googling something like “PIC16 send UART” seems to come up with a lot of stuff.

I hope this helps.