I bought four of them a month or two ago. I finally got them working after some tribulation. (It was my first LCD experience, so debugging took a while.) What I finally figured out is that contrary to the supplied datasheet, they need a contrast bias voltage of negative 1 to 2 volts (It's been a while, but -1.5V seems familiar.) If you directly ground the contrast pin, and look very carefully under the right light, you can probably barely make out your intended text. (Took a few hours of hair pulling to catch that.). Oh, another oddity, is that this produces way too much contrast until the screen is initialized. That is probably why your cursor is visible until you initalize it. I've tried three of my displays, and none were visible until the voltage approached -0.5V. I was using an AVR, with slightly modified C routines from Peter Fleury's LCD library at: http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/pfleury/avr-software.html (I know it's not a PIC, but it might be of some help.) - Cameron ----- Original Message ----- From: "Philip Pemberton" To: Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 3:51 AM Subject: Re: [PIC]: BGMicro LCD1025 40x2 LCD panel In message <00c201c3a000$e0889f00$0100a8c0@XPPRO> John Ferrell wrote: > > 3) My PIC is broken > > [ Close to impossible ] > I just put one in the trash can. It works fine with leds, but would not > drive a servo. I finally broke down and got a scope out. It just would not > drive the bits any lower than 1.2 volts! I think I can rule out the possibility of a bad PIC - even LCDproc can't get the display to, erm, display anything. Looks like it's time to have a word with BGMicro :-/ I'm off to a hamfest tomorrow anyway - there's usually at least one person selling "intelligent" LCDs and VFDs. I bought a pack of three Samsung 20T202DA1J VFDs for #5 last year - I'm planning to fit one to my Linux box as a status display. Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem@dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, Ethernet (Acorn AEH62), http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 8xCD, framegrabber, Teletext For sale: Minor planetoid. First person to land there gets ownership. -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body