We should do that. Within the last couple of months we had a thread about this--the pin-out of the 8052.com SBC did not meet some people's expectations based on what they assumed to be the HD44780 pinout. They said they'd never seen an LCD with that pinout. On the other hand, I had personally never seen any other pinout than the one I was using on the SBC (and had used in several client projects in the past)--and I had purchased several different models of the LCD from Digikey when the original LCD wasn't in stock, so it wasn't just a freak accident of some offbeat part.

And that's just the 14-pin pinout. There's also the signal issues.

I don't have firm information on the "E" pin, but I once developed LCD code for an LCD that was supposedly HD44780-compatible and I followed the 44780 specifications perfectly and it refused to work. Only when I inverted the polarity of the "E" signal did it work. I don't have information on what that LCD was--that was actually back in 1998 as I recall. I also had one other LCD about that time that also behaved differently than the spec (and differently than my other rogue LCD). Again, I wasn't making an effort to collect information on the LCDs at the time so I don't have information on specifically what part that was.

But I do know that while there may be an established HD44780 specification and perhaps most people are lucky enough to have only used ones that followed the spec to the letter, I've run into enough LCDs that don't follow it perfectly to know better than to critique people that have problems with their LCD too strongly. They very well may have read the spec and be justifiably frustrated as to why it's not working.

Regards,
Craig Steiner