Help with LCD displaying black blocks

Troubleshooting
1

Hi all,

I’m new to the Particle community and IoT in general. My background is in software development but I have very limited knowledge of the wiring and electronics side of things.

I’ve had some minor success with a few basic projects and have recently undertaken the task of getting the Photon to work with a 16x2 LCD screen. I’ve been following these two pages to get setup:

http://blog.jongallant.com/2015/10/particle-photon-lcd-setup.html
Liquid Crystal Library?

I’ve had a bit of success but I’ve run into an issue that has me stumped. Basically I have power going to the LCD screen and have a potentiometer setup to set the text contrast but when I run the Spark-HelloSparky.cpp example all I see a black blocks rather than the expected text. What am I doing wrong?

I’ve attached a screen shot of the issue with a partial view of my wiring. I’ve tripled checked the wiring and it should match the wiring shown in Jon Gallant’s blog.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

IMAG0483.jpg2688×1520 1.07 MB

2

You will need to first solder the header pins to the lcd to ensure good connectivity.

3 Likes
3

Thanks for that, I was worried that simply hanging off the pins would be a bit ‘hacky’. I’ll solder the LCD and tell you how I get on.