I just dug up a bunch of old serial LCD modules from a few years ago. I had gotten them from
Scott Edwards Electronics for some
BASIC Stamp projects. The LCD's are parallel, but Scott Edwards adds a 9600 baud serial adapter. Since newer Macs don't have any kind of low-level serial port, I was wondering if it would be possible to send data over USB. I'm not sure of the capabilities of USB, but it would make sense for it to have some form of rudimentary communication without all the other "stuff." I intend to work the LCD into a PowerMac modification if I can get it to display data. Any thoughts?
Sending it certain control characters can do things like activate the backlight or define custom fonts. Pretty neat :-P
Update: It looks like going over USB may not be too easy, unless I can get
this piece of hardware and get the Linux software to run under Mac OS X. The USBLCD adpater outputs signals for the HD44780 controller, and so does Scott Edwards' serial backpack. I'll just unsolder the SEETRON serial adpater and put on the USB one. In theory, the ony issue here is purchasing and software...
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