LCD Smartie

LCD Smartie is open-source software for Microsoft Windows which allows a character LCD to be used as an auxiliary display device for a PC. Supported devices include displays based on the Hitachi HD44780 Controller, the Matrix Orbital Serial/USB LCD, and Palm OS devices (when used in conjunction with PalmOrb). The program has built in support for many systems statistics (i.e. cpu load, network utilization, free disk space...), downloading RSS feeds, Winamp integration and support for several other popular applications. To support less common applications LCD Smartie uses a powerful plugin system.

The project was started as freeware by Basie P who wrote it in delphi. After running the software as freeware from 2001 to late 2004, Basie P quit the project and passed it on to Chris Lansley as an Open Source project hosted on the Sourceforge servers. Chris Lansley maintained the project for few years, and now the whole project remains alive thanks to the program community. LCD Smartie is a relatively mature software and development of the main executable has slowed down considerably, most of the new features are introduced by new plugins which are released by both the core team and by the community. The LCD Smartie forums are quite active and are the primary source for support and developer discussion.

To facilitate the use of LCD Smartie on modern PCs running version of windows 7 and 8 the team has started working on a USB interface to connect LCDs to a PC that does not require any additional kernel driver and provides a complete plug and play experience.