serial display help?
 

Hello, started building a MPGuino, and bought a Parallax Serial LCD 2x16 with speaker. not realizing i bought a serial LCD instead of Parallel i get home and wire evrything up on my desk to a solderless breadboard (no inputs for vss or inj obviously). upon uploading the latest version of the code to my Arduino Uno rev 3 the screen powers up, makes some beeps from the speaker (actually a nice tune) and the screen is showing what looks like an alien language. they are just random ASCII characters that make no sense, mostly "?" "&" and just boxes, and lines. frustrated for several hours looking through code which i don't understand, and checking over my wires time and time again.. everything looks fine to me.

please help me anyone, documentation for the Parallax board can be found here
parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/docs/prod/displays/27979-Parallax-Serial-LCDs-Product-Guide-v3.1.pdf

can the code be changed to use a serial LCD, or should i remove the daughterboard that seems to be a serial to parallel interface with speaker and contrast control.... what to do what to do...



BTW this is going in a 92 Saturn SL2, odometer reads 265,xxx and is stuck... i would like to use the ability of the mpguino to keep track of mileage between engine service

If you are familiar with Arduino coding that should be enough.
Arduino Playground - SerialLCD

"frustrated for several hours looking through code which i don't understand"


Sounds like you're best bet is finding a parallel lcd, and keeping your serial one for a future project. Should be easy to find on ebay (from chinese sellers) for under $5 incl shipping. The downside: waiting 1-2-3 weeks to get your project rolling.

It's not so complicated to get serial LCD working with MPGuino with basic functionality. But it requires lots of changes to the code though.
Much easier and quicker way will be getting a parallel LCD.

Using serial LCD has one big advantage over parallel setup. It leaves you lot's of free pins for other interesting functionalities you may embed into MPGuino. Like MPG sensitive cruise control, for example.