FPGA/CPLD 16x2 LCD Interface

Project Info
Author: Chris
Difficulty: Easy
Time Invested: 2 Hours

Prerequisites:
Take a look at the above
articles before continuing
to read this article.
           There are quite a few articles that I've written that feature the 16x2 HD44780 LCD. However I never got the chance to make a simple example of how you can use an FPGA or CPLD with some verilog or VHDL to tell the LCD what to display.
           This article will show the process of choosing parts, building a schematic, connecting the hardware and writing the hardware description to control a HD44780 LCD interface and output a few characters to the 16x2 LCD screen. To make things a little easier, we'll use a familiar board, the CPLD Dev Board that I introduced a few years ago. It's dated but still a good learning platform!

FPGA / CPLD 16x2 LCD Interface - Demonstration

FPGA / CPLD 16x2 LCD Interface - Setup

Purpose & Overview of this project
           The goal of this project is to build a simple interface module for a CPLD/FPGA device to connect up and control a HD44780 LCD module. The module has a set of commands that tell it what to do, so our custom module inside the FPGA/CPLD will need to be able to craft these commands to display characters exactly as we want them to be displayed.
           We will achieve this goal by first adding a 25.175 MHz clock signal input and then wire-wrapping the LCD module and a trimpot variable resistor to the already existing CPLD Dev Board. VHDL will be used to build the custom FPGA/CPLD module to interface with the HD44780 LCD.



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