The Daily WTF

Alyssa worked in a shop building small runs of custom hardware. Recently, she tackled a project that involved an Arduino talking to an LCD screen. Since several programmers had just left their jobs, she was the last programmer standing and thus on her own for this assignment. One of the engineers who’d worked there before her had really liked a particular brand of programmable displays because they came with software that allowed non-programmers to design serial-driven user interfaces, and had its own onboard processor. That was what Alyssa wound up using for this project.

Alyssa first tried to control the screens using the manufacturer’s own serial library. She couldn’t get any of the system commands to work over serial, but they did work if she used the manufacturer’s test programs, running on the screen’s onboard processor.

This led her to try programming the screen directly … which turned out

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