To link a standard 16×2 LCD directly with the microcontroller, for instance Arduino, you would need atleast 6 I/O pins to talk to the LCD. However, if you use an LCD module with I2C interface, you ...

Hmm, I was thinking of talking to an MSP430 and have that do the lcd-stuff (have a couple hd44780s lying around). That we you also have a bunch more io-pins to play around with.

This works because many devices can safely ignore pin-swapped i2c traffic on their input. I’ve tried this successfully with the popular VL53 ToF sensors connected to an ESP32. Report comment ...