LCD Terminal

When playing around with Linux on an embedded PC in 2002 I noticed that the Linux kernel has the ability to output its startup log messages to a serial port. This fascinated me very much because I did not intent to run that embedded PC with a computer screen.

Also I was working on an embedded TCP/IP stack at that time and was looking for some way to find out what Ethernet frames and IP datagrams my stack is receiving.

So the idea came to me to build an LCD terminal. I had an LCD display with 2 lines with 20 characters each and was looking for some project to familiarize myself with PIC micro-controllers. With the Linux startup messages in mind I wanted to see all these messages scrolling over my display.