I'll dig out my notes on this LCD shortly, in the mean time.

Pull the wires off of the pins a little to expose part of the pin, or put the wires on so that the small window in the connector showing the metal part is accessible. Then test to make sure you have +5V there.

Here is an edited script I use in Melvin. Note, I am battling a cold so my head is full of goo and my editing may not be perfect...

# Clear the screen and turn off the cursor and position top left backlight brightness and contrast set
SendSerial(D14, 9600,0,1,4,12,19,30,255,31,80)
Sleep(50)
SendSerial(D14, 9600,0,3,4,6,"HELLO WORLD")

If memory serves me correctly the LCD has a welcome message when powered on so the above script shouldn't really be required. I would check to make sure that there are +5V at the LCD first and that the supply can provide enough current for the display.

You are right Rich, the LCD05 does have a welcome message that can be seen clearly on the green display version (without backlight), but on the blue version it is quite faint until the backlight is illuminated.

Rich thats great i hear that you didnot know any thing about robotics but you learnt many things one help can you teach me about codings in programing because its my computer science project blush blush blush

Will you a teacher for me but no fees

Thanks for the replies guys.

No worries Tony. Yeah it is serial I'm trying to connect to. I'll check out your tutorial out in a bit. I still havn't got my multimeter that I lent out back yet (really missing it now) but WHEN I get it back I will test it. Although the two ports I tried does power a servo and LED.

I would like to try it on i2c, but the v4 I'm using for testing is inside K-9, and the port is quite difficult to get to at the mo.

I feel your pain Rich. I've been battling a rotten cold since Thursday, so robotics has taken a back seat until my head clears up, but wanted to try the display as it arrived so quickly. tired

So I finally got hold of my multimeter. I did what Rich suggested and it turns out the 1 amp 5v regulator was not suppling enough power.

I decided to dig K9's EZ-B out and connect the LCD in to an i2c port. Partial success. I ran Tony's script from his tutorial, and the screen light up, but no text. It wasn't until I had a closer look then I could see there actually was text being displayed, just very very faint and only viewable at an angle. The first pic below is looking at the screen face on, the second at an angle.

So what am I missing? confused

Set up the contrast.

My init script from Melvin was this;

# Clear the screen and turn off the cursor and position top left backlight brightness and contrast set
I2CWrite(0,0xC6,0,1,4,12,19,30,255,31,80)

I2CWrite(0,0xc6,0,3,4,6,"MELVIN MKI")

Steve G, I think you may need to adjust the contrast set byte from memory I think its command 30.

Tony