A lot of low-price LCD displays available on the market are compatible with the Hitachi HD44780 driver and you can easly display and control their text using the LiquidCrystal library.

In this article i have used a blue 16×4 LCD display but the connections and the script are valid for each kind of HD44780 compatible displays.

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WIRES:

Following you will find some useful (I hope) images about the wire connections and a little schema to better understand them.
These LCD usually have 16 pins but you really need to connect only 10 of them (or 12 because the last two pins - 15 and 16 - are optionals and depend if you want turn on the led backlight)

Click to zoom the image!

One potentiometers is only used to set the right lcd contrast.

CODE

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>
 
// Set LCD pins in according with your connections
LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);
 
void setup()
{
  lcd.begin(16, 4);
  lcd.clear();                     // Clear screen
  lcd.setCursor(0,0);           // Row1: set cursor to column 0, row 0 (the first row)
  lcd.print("ActionScript.it");    
 
  lcd.setCursor(0,1);           // Row2: set cursor to column 0, row 1
  lcd.print("Adobe UserGroup");
 
  lcd.setCursor(-4,2);	      // Row 3
  lcd.print("---------------");
 
}
 
void loop()
{
  // Update row 4 every second
 
  lcd.setCursor(-4,3);
  lcd.print("Tutorials,Books,");
  delay(1000);
 
  lcd.setCursor(-4,3);
  lcd.print("News, Support,  ");
  delay(1000);
 
  lcd.setCursor(-4,3);
  lcd.print("Reviews ....    ");
  delay(1000);
 
}

NOTE: there is a little bug in the LiquidLibrary to manage 16×4 displays. If you try to set the third and fourth row to start from column 0, the text will start from position 5.
The reason is that this library is written to work with 20×4 displays and you should modify the core class to fix it. So, to avoid it, my little trick was just start the third and fourth line from position -4.
If you have other displays (16×1, 16×2, 20×4 and so on you shouldn’t have this issue.

As i sayd you can use this way to manage every kind of LCD Display Hitachi HD44780 compatible.