LCD Controller Program

I recently bought a LCD display (Warning: RAS syndrome present :-P) from an online hardware store. It has 20x4 characters and uses the (common) HD44780 controller. A standard parallel cable is used to communicate with it.

The store and the supplier recommends using a program named LCD Smartie to control the display. Although this program is open source, it is unfortunately made specifically for Windows. I tried to use another program (for Linux) named lcdproc, but I could not get it to display anything at all on the LCD. The solution is of course: Make your own driver and program(s).

Yes, I hacked together some code to successfully drive it under Linux, and the result can be downloaded here. The code is released under a MIT License, so you can do (almost) whatever you want with it.

If you want to use it on another platform you almost certainly have to change some something, since I used Linux specific port programming functions.

Here is a photo of the LCD displaying a quote from Linus Torvalds: