[caption id="attachment_50" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="lcd hooked up to an arduino"]

I cannibalized an old floppy drive ribbon cable to build a custom cable to hook the LCD up to my arduino. I then downloaded Adafruit's improved lcd library for arduino and now I can output 32 characters worth of data from my arduino.
I'm planning a project that will need the lcd so stay tuned....