My LCD display from Adafruit has been staring at me for awhile now and I finally pulled it out and started tinkering with it.  The hardest part about working with it out of the box is soldering headers onto the LCD board.  In a convoluted and more playful fashion I used an old Cisco serial cable and a small mint tin to connect the 16 leads of the LCD to a small breadboard.  Following a pinout diagram from Hacktronics I connected the arduino to the breadboard and a 1k ohm resistor.  After verifying continuity with a multimeter to all leads I uploaded the code I got from Hacktronics.  After the Arduino rebooted the result felt like an application of Clarke’s Law.  Its really just proof of concept level implementation but it taught me about the LCD library and soldering techniques.

It kind of looks like a hack job…because it is 🙂