Almost ervery developer faces one day the situation that his (or her) uC project grows and finally runs out of port pins. In this case there are basically two possible solutions feasible. Either take a bigger uC or use some kind of port expander. If one would like to avoid a bigger uC you have a large number of solutions for port expanding on the market. The most common ones are shift registers using I2C or SPI interface, giving you the choice between flexibility of I2C, but expensive and slow and SPI, which is fast and simple, but less flexible and needs even one more port pin than I2C. Any case, it costs you 2 or 3 pins to drive your periherial like a HD44780 LCD.

Now my idea was, to drive such a LCD to use a simple HC595 shift register with SPI interface, but wanted to spend for it only a single port pin of the uC. It's clear that this is not breaking any speed records compared to a 8 bit parallel interface, but in contrary to other solutions already existing, data transfer is fast and simple enough to write text and pseudo graphics (via custom characters) on the LCD faster that you can notice. The chosen chip is a 74HC595 with a hand full of cheap components that make up a smart and simple to drive 4 Bit interface for the very popular 2x16 Character LCD Modules or any other LCD using the legendary Hitachi HD44780 or a compatible controller. Of course other format LCDs do work as well as long as they support the 4 Bit Hitachi Mode as most do. As the LCD module at least requires in addition to the 4 data line some control lines like E and RS (R/W tied to ground) and the shift register has 8 data lines, 2 of them are free for other usage, like switching of back light illumination or the like. The basic idea of driving the shift register is to connect the uC port pin to the DS data input via a RC low pass filter and directly also to the SCK shift register clock input. The clock input is edge triggered (rising edge only) and if an idle high level is used, a short low pulse will trigger the shift clock when rising, but the RC at the data input DS didn't have enough time to fall to a low level, so that a logic high gets shifted in. In case the low pulse is long enough for the RC to reach (almost) low level the rising edge of the port pin shifts in a 0.

Some readers might state now that this is not a new principle and so far they're right. It is used in a similar way for such purpose for example by Roman Black and he discribes it on his Web page www.romanblack.com/shift1.htm in detail. (He states, that the principle of using a RC filter to separate short from longer pulses is not new and he didn't invent it, just found the idea somewhere in the Web, and doesn't know who did. Neither do I.)

In his solution he uses a 2nd RC with a 20 times longer time to trigger the latch register to output the data at the pins.

That has two significant disadvantages my solution avoids.

First, as the E input of the LCD needs to see a positive pulse to carry over the 4 data lines and RS state, one has to send the same data twice to create an E pulse, that is, 2 times shift each logic one in of 1us (plus a longer recovery time for the RC, e.g. 15us) and zero of 15us (plus a longer recovery time for the RC, e.g. 30us) followed after 8 shifted bits by a latch pulse of 200us (plus 300us recovery). That really sums up and slows transfer down as an  8 bit wide command in two 4 bit steps takes 3.2ms worst case.

Second, not to forget to mention that in his solution the last bit (Q0) that is shifted in is not usable as it is always 0, leaving only 6 interface pins and 1 spare pin for other use.

The impovement now is to use a different way to carry over the data from the shift register to the data register and to automatically generate the E pulse for the LCD to carry over the output data in a single step without sacrifying any of the data bits. The idea in detail is to use the Q7' direct output of the shift register to trigger the output latch register to carry over automatically the shifted data to the output pins. Of course, that would mean that the first bit for Q7 to be shifted in has to be always a logic 1. I.e. as soon as the last bit for Q0 gets shifted in a 1 (rising edge) at Q7' pin occurs and as it is connected to STCP, the store or latch register input, the data immediately occur at the output pins Q0 to Q7.

To clear the shift register, a second RC with a timing value of T2 >= 20*T1 is used to trigger the MR reset input. A speciality of the 595 chip is, that the MR reset only clears the shift register, but not the latch register for the output pins. So Q7' pin gets cleared to 0 but Q0 to Q7 remain unchanged. This falling edge of Q7' is used to trigger a small simple Monoflop made out of a BS170 MOSFET two resistors and a capacitor to generate the E pulse as soon as the (internal) register of the HC595 gets cleared. Immediately after the recovery time of the long second RC the next data can be transfered to the LCD. The timings I tried out with an Arduino sums up to 1.3ms worst case for a 8 bit data transfer to a LCD, assuming all bits are 0, which is not an legal command the LCD would understand. I wrote a simple Arduino code which is easy to port to other platforms or to be used in own applications. See schematic diagram that makes it more clear how this works.

Questions welcome (German or English language, please).