apalonquantum

From an eletrical point of view it should be easy as pie to connect this LCD to your picaxe. The question is: will you be able to control it? Every controller has specific commands to control the various functions. You'll need a library suitable for the controller on this LCD - or write your own, it's no wizardry.

Unfortunately the type of controller for this board is not mentioned on the ebay page, so there is no (at least no easy) way to tell what it will take to get the LCD up and running on your picaxe. As the photo shows this LCD connected to an arduino and this cooperation is also mentioned in the text, chances are that youll be able to find an arduino library which you can adapt for the picaxe. Or maybe even a pic library. You'l know only after you have the module in your hands and can identiy the controller. The PCF8574J is a port expander, not an LCD controller. This type of chip gives you additional parallel I/O ports from a serial interface.

This chip is used on the LCD to interface the parallel I/O of the LCD controller to a serial port (I²C.). At least the LCD you mention in post #4 comes with test code and examples in C++ to download. You may be able to adapt this code to your platform.

What Are Two Predefined File Pointers In C on this page. These 2 line LCDs are pretty standard (probably only a few more or less compatible controllers), so it shouldm't be too much of an issue to find other suitable code once you know which controller is on board. For $ 2.45 you can't do much wrong. Buy one or two and start experimenting. I took a quick look at the PICAXE manual. It looks like it has support for either parallel LCD's or serial (meaning RS232 type serial) not IIC. So you will have to roll your own for use with IIC.

Home Projects Hobbybotics Serial LCD. The primary device I use to provide feedback is a Liquid Crystal Display. The Hobbybotics Serial LCD controller.

I think you can find LCDs that use RS232 type serial interfaces, which might be a lot simpler to use with PICAXE. I say RS232 because I mean the ansynchronous serial used in serial communications. The signal levels will probably not be RS232, but TTL level, which will interface directly with the PICAXE serial out pin. Click to expand.That is exactly what it is. Though in some other version instead of a firmware chip they use a Picaxe 18M2 with some code to interface between LCD and the Microcontroller. The way i see it now is either to buy a firmware chip or to use a second Picaxe as i mentioned before. I will check the availability and cost of the firmware chip and think about it.

Here is the code for the 18M2 to act as slave interface. I guess i could adjust it for use with the 20M2 Picaxe i already have. Then connect it with the chineese LCD i bought from e-bay. I will wire it as shown in page 5 of this PDF.