User Manual

5. Orangutan LCD

The OrangutanLCD class and the C functions in this section provide a variety of ways of displaying

data to the LCD screen of an Orangutan robot controller (LV, SV, SVP, and X2) and 3pi robot,

providing an essential tool for user interfaces and debugging. The library implements the standard

4-bit HD44780 protocol (except on the Orangutan X2, for which the 8-bit protocol is used), and it uses

the busy-wait-flag feature to avoid the unnecessarily long delays present in other 4-bit LCD Arduino

libraries at the time of this library’s release. It is designed to gracefully handle alternate use of the

LCD data lines. It will change their data direction registers and output states only when needed for

an LCD command, after which it will immediately restore the registers to their previous states. This

allows the LCD data lines to function, for example, as pushbutton inputs and LED drivers on the 3pi

and Orangutans.

For a list of the standard characters available on the LCD, see page 17 of the HD44780 interface

datasheet [https://www.pololu.com/file/0J72/HD44780.pdf] (330k pdf).

For C and C++ users, the standard C function printf() from stdio.h is made available. See below for

more information.

For a higher level overview of this library and example programs that show how this library can be

used, please see Section 3.d of the Pololu AVR C/C++ Library User’s Guide [https://www.pololu.com/

docs/0J20].

5. Orangutan LCD Page 24 of 77