PerLCD version 1.0
==================

The Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform.  Among the
many things one might want to do with such a device is connect an LCD
to it and print stuff (at least that's what I wanted to do with it).  

There are a couple of excellent low-level libraries that can be linked
into an arduino sketch to provide this functionality.  I've chosen the
LCD4Bit library to link against.  The perlcd.cc sketch provides a few
higher level functions as well as a serial listener.

This Perl library provides a very high level interface for formatting
and sending messages to the sketch's listener.  Once the device is
wired up to an LCD (a fairly trivial task), the USB serial drivers
installed, and the sketch compiled and uploaded, getting text on the
screen should be no more difficult than the example in the POD's
synopsis: Zero knowledge of LCDs required.

The sketch provided can obviously be used with a client library
written in any language, the choice of Perl was (almost) arbitrary.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

DEPENDENCIES

See the POD for information for dependencies.  The only required Perl
library is Device::SerialPort available from CPAN.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2007 by Kevin Montuori & mconsultancy

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.1 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.