Got Servo and LCD Panel to Work Together

I was wondering if the little Arduino would be able to keep up with a multiple number of tasks that I was giving it. I was able to program the Arduino UNO from my RPi to have two serial connections. One was to my Pololu Mini-Maestro and the other was to my Parallax 2x16 LCD display. I was able to get it to display what values I was sending to the Maestro. I did discover that turning off the backlight on the LCD took too much time. I also discovered that the servos that I am using respond better to 9 volts than they do to 6 volts. The serial connections were at a 5 volt level.

On the Maestro, I used the gnd, 5 volt, Rx, and Tx lines on the side and connected them to gnd, 5 volts, digital pin 4, and digital pin 3. This is the GND, VIN, RX, and TX pins on the left hand side of the board.  I removed the VSRV=VIN jumper and connected the 9 volt supply to the servo power on the bottom right.  During the test I had the servo connected to channel 0.

On the LCD panel, I used the gnd, 5 volt, and Rx lines and connected them to gnd, 5 volt, and digital pin 6. Fortunately, I was able to easily accommodate the different pins due to the fact that I was using the Parallax breadboard shield which breaks out each of these pins around the breadboard.

My main motivation in doing this experiment was to see how many things I could seasonably  attach to the Arduino that would be controlled independently.  This gives me hope for being able to move much of the hardware control down to the Arduino micro-controller.