My project requires a display with AT LEAST 20x40 characters. I've found a few reasonably priced graphical LCDS at crystalfontz, but I'm not sure how to determine if the controller will interface with the ATmega168.

For example:

CrystalFontz graphical LCD

The controller datasheet says it supports a parallel 8080-series MCU Interface(8-bit, 9-bit, 16-bit & 18-bit) and a 3-line serial interface.

Is there any reason why I couldn't get this to work? Are there any other reasonably priced suggestions?

I'm about a month late from the looks of things, but was looking through the posts and came across yours so I figured I'd try to answer in case you're still interested...

Yes, you can certainly make that LCD work just fine. Either through the parallel or serial interface, though parallel will be faster, and probably easier... though it'll use more i/o pins...

HOWEVER... Keep a few things in mind...

You obviously won't be able to use the nerdkits lcd.h file to interface with this, you'll have to create your own...

Looking at the mapping and timing in the datasheet, it shouldn't be too bad at all to do... BUT... Remember that this IS a graphical display, NOT a text display... In other words, you're going to need to either create your own graphics routines (lots of math! ;) or if you're looking for actual characters, i.e. ASCII, then you'll need to create a "lookup table"...

I haven't gotten into the ATMega168 far enough to know if it's onboard EEPROM would be suitable enough for this, or if you'd be better off using an external EEPROM...

Basically you'll have all the characters (each represented by a fixed grid of pixels) programmed into the EEPROM... When you need to display a certain character you'll need to pull the info out of the EEPROM and feed it to the LCD... Actually, given the right set up you should be able to feed the EEPROM directly to the LCD and only have to interface the address lines of the EEPROM...

The point is, this display is designed to display PIXELS... Each "pixel" of a certain color (R G or B) is assigned a value based on the "brightness" of that pixel for that particular color... It's NOT as simple as just feeding a character "byte" out to the display and it displaying it... The nerdkits LCD does this because it's just that, a character display... It has it's own EEPROM that contains all the ASCII "font" data...

Bottom line... Yes, it can do it, and it'd be a lot of fun... but if you're looking to just get a project accomplished and don't want to futz around with it, you'd better look elsewhere! ;)

Hm... I'm not sure if the chip that comes with the nerdkit will work with this screen, unless it has it's own cpu.... 176x220 pixels, time it all by 3 (red, green, blue), and you get one frame size - 116.160kB which is (i think) the amount of memory the best ATmega series micro-controller has.