lcd avr black boxes
hello
the STK500 is a development board for AVR microcontrollers, if you build your own hardware and have an AVR programmer you don't have to use it.
the lcd shows black boxes becouse the LCD chipset is not initialise. Most LCD's use an HD44780 compatible controller, so your lcd allmost certainly uses such a controller, and you can find alot of infos about it.
the best thing to do is to split the project in smaller pieces, first of all make the lcd print some text, and after that you should work on the keyboard part, becouse you might have to put some pull-ul resistors there to make it work, or activate the internat pull-ups in the microcontroller .
Another possibility is that you didn'd supply the negative tension for the microcontroller (check the LCD's datasheet, usually needs -5V). For negative tension conversion you might use an TC7660 .
For the lcd control, you can find alot of information (and ready-made projects) on
www.avrfreaks.net .
If you take it step by step we might be able to help you, but i guess nobody would make your design from scratch for you, becouse after all, it is your project.
Adi.