beelzerob
Senior Member
Heh..ya, I'm familiar with these. I went through a phase where I was utterly into LCD's, and more specifically, VFD's. I bought a couple off ebay and had my fun. LCD's can be had pretty cheaply, but you have to beware getting ones that can't be seen at certain angles.
It's true, with various free software out there (jalcd is one, can't remember the others), you can send almost any info to these things, but you have to also be careful that it doesn't suck up CPU. Maybe that's just the pixel-based VFD's I was using, where you had to send it the whole set of pixels for a 320 X 200 grid every quarter second to have any animation....maybe that was it.
But either way, as much as I'd like something with an LCD, I really need something with a decent keypad, if I was going to have a standalone keypad.