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According to page 10 of this PDF https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/HD44780.pdf
The HD44780 has enough DDRAM to operate an 80 character display. A 16x2 display has 32 characters meaning we have 48 characters of free DDRAM. Is there anything in the Arduino's LiquidCrystal library which allows direct access to this DDRAM space? The HD44780 datasheet says it can be used as generalised RAM.
I haven't used that particular library but I have used the ddram and cgram as memory / buffets. So the feasibility is never in question.
The downside with this approach is speed and real estate. Those devices are slow by mcu standard. You then have to provision for the rw pin and the data pins - both read and writes. That's what you should check for in the library.
But it is workable for sure.
