I play with FPGAs on a Terasic DE1 starter board, wouldn’t it be great if SFE made a breakout board with a 40pin connector and ribbon cable that plugs right into the DE0,DE1,DE2 etc boards? The middle of the board would have a slot where you can insert the Text LCDs, just slide them in and out when you want to use other colors, the edges of the board will have other pins from the Terasic board for power and signals to hook up the other Sparkfun goodies, (GPS, LEDs, color LCD etc). When I hooked up a text LCD to my DE1, I actually cut a hard drive cable, separated the wires with a scalpel and soldered those wires to the text LCD.