DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

Last weekend I built an RBBB board that I bought at DorkbotPDX 0x01. This is the cheapest way to get into an Arduino that I know of. And pretty much the cheapest microcontroller setup you can get. Thanks guys who put these kits together for us locally! I had never done anything with Arduino before (hardly even with microcontrollers) so this offered a low entry fee and great support.

I had some 2-line LCDs I had bought a few weeks ago from Electronics Goldmine for $1.79. They aren't backlit but they are so cheap it just seemed like a good thing to have. One painful thing about Hitachi 44780-based LCD displays is that they use a LOT of IO pins to display stuff. 8bit mode uses all of the digital pins on the Arduino. 4bit mode still uses a lot. I saw some other solutions like using a shift register to bring it down to two pins. But the simplicity of of Serial LCDs was really appealing, so I thought I'd rig one up using the RBBB as a controller. Any future projects that need an LCD can then just talk serially to the Arduino LCD controller and very little is needed to make things work.