Whilst on the subject of LCD's - I see a lot of code that polls the ready flag. Many years ago I designed a product and the code polled the ready bit( or is it called BUSY??) -with no timeout and thus the thing died when the LCD was faulty. Nowadays I tend to just add a delay which is probably easier than adding a timeout to the ready poll. If the LCD fails, then no display and I don't need to cope with testing for timeouts.

What is the collective opinion? Poll for ready or just a delay?

Someone should sent hate mail to the designer of that dammned Hitachi lcd controller chip - think of the collective time wasted coaxing a LCD to work!! I always chuckle when I talk to someone who's had trouble getting things things to work - once you've figured out the quirks it's quite easy. This is a device that one has to RTFM very closely.