I was driving around various Silicon Valley electronics and surplus stores (like HSC and Anchor Electronics) and decided to stop in at Microcenter. I remembered that they supposedly were beginning to stock items from Sparkfun and the Maker Shed. And, indeed they do! I found a Serial LCD module from Sparkfun that I thought might be fun to have, so I got one:

A couple of quick caveats though:

• The module has absolutely no documentation in the box. A quick bit of searching revealed the datasheet for the device, and that was helpful (although not the clearest that I’ve seen). If you are familiar with HD44780 devices, you’ll have no problems.
• The pigtail they ship with it connects to the JST connector, and uses stranded wire. Not the best thing to plug into breadboards and the like. I soldered some female headers onto the unpopulated connector, and that worked out better.
• It doesn’t appear that you can load custom characters over the serial interface like you can with the traditional interface. Bummer.

Still, it was dead easy. If you want a simple module to do some simple display tasks with only three wires, it works just fine.