Buying from China on eBay

With good stories from other people, I decided to try my hand at purchasing some items on eBay that I wanted in my kit - and first to arrive is the 16x2 backlist LCD based on the Hitachi HD44780. It took around a month to get them here (New Zealand) from China, a little longer than they said, but it was Chinese New Year in between so I did expect that. They were certainly not the cheapest of the ones on there, but many didn't ship here, so they were ruled out.

They were well packed with plenty of bubble wrap and arrived undamaged.

I soldered one of them up with header pins and attached them to my bread board, which immediately pushed the not soldered well enough ones back out again.

So on the second go I was successful with all but the final pin which I was worried about the soldering anyway - I am using a very fine tip on my Hakko and am very pleased with its performance.

Wiring it all up, figuring out how the LCD backlight is turned on and skipping the trimpot all made for a nice experience. I used the sample Arduino sketch just to check the device out to ensure it was working as expected - I didn't want to go through the same with the MSP430 Launchpad as I haven't put headers on my board yet.

Works exactly as advertised and i'd recommend the seller for people looking for these LCD devices.