The cold is leaving my workspace, and the heat is returning to my soldering iron. It shouldn’t be long before I have more fun projects to share with you. I’ve been focusing my efforts towards my music, noise-making / manipulating projects and staying warm. Effects pedals, bent instruments and analog fun are all in the works. I’ll try to find some time to finish at least one of the projects on my bench in the near future.

A good friend of mine is quite a bit like me in that he loves salvaging electronics. He works at a local cable provider that was throwing away a bunch of devices that had these nice 80 character (40 x 2) LCDs in them. He snagged them and generously gave three to me. This morning I decided to figure out if they used Hitachi HD44780 drivers as I suspected (16-pin interface). First I soldered up some pin header, snipped and wired the included ribbon cable and made this handy little breadboard adapter for easy prototyping. I had to make a few changes in my LiquidCrystal calls to make sure the library knew I was using a 40 x 2 LCD, and voila! Thanks again Yaffe for these awesome toys!

Check out the shirt on shirt.woot.com today. I almost fell out of my chair: