CWLinux 1602 Serial LCD
A few years ago I bought a CWLinux 1602 serial LCD to display things like uptime (as seen below in dd:hh:mm:ss format), CPU temperature, memory used, disk space used, etc. As the name implies, it is a 16 column, 2 line lcd display. It is powered by a Hitachi HD44780 controller, one of the most common LCD controllers in use today.
I found a simple driver writtern by Stefano Barbato at codesink.org that would be perfect for what I wanted to do. I could gather information with a bash script and use the simple command line utility to output information to the serial lcd display. The only problem was that the utility didn't exactly work.
Stefano's utility worked fine for output on a single line of the LCD, but his utility lacked a way to pass multi-line output. I tweaked the control loop and added a way for the utility to detect multi-line output and pass the newline control character to the display.
Because Stefano's program is shared under a rights-reserved copyright I unfortunately cannot share my edits to the code with the original codebase in place. I am currently working on a full re-write that I can release under GPL.