Bad Lumex LCD, or me?

I recently bought a 2x16 LCD display by lumex. It is your standard 14 pin LCD display. I connected 5V to Vdd (Pin 1), GND to Vss (Pin 2), and GND to Vo(Pin 3). Vo is the contrast adjust on the LCD. When all three of those pins were connected, only the bottom row on the LCD display became visible. Did I do something wrong with the hook-up, or is this a bad display?

I've been very careful with this display, using a grounded pad and grounding myself everytime before I touched it. Do you think this problem may be caused by static damage?

What do you mean visible?
If you just connected Power and contrast, then all LCDs have solid black boxes on first line and the second line is empty. This means that LCD was not initialized yet (done by external MCU), is this what you see? Did you connect that LCD to MCU (using 8 or 4 data lines and at least 2 signal wires).

I agree with Jay, it sounds EXACTLY like it should look if you're not initialising it, either correctly (or not at all - which is what it sounds like you're doing).

Yeah, it wasn't initialized. Thanks for the info, I just figured that all the boxes would turn black, not just the top row. I've got to get better with my PIC programming before I can initialize it

Thanks again!

adamthole said:

Yeah, it wasn't initialized. Thanks for the info, I just figured that all the boxes would turn black, not just the top row. I've got to get better with my PIC programming before I can initialize it

Click to expand...

By default it's set as a single row, part of your initialisation tells it to be double row 8)

Check my PIC tutorials for LCD routines, they are fast and reliable - it took me a LONG time to get LCD's working, most code I found on the net wouldn't work :cry: