cferrarini:
Only the arduino consumes 46 mA, with the Lcd Shield modified by the diode around 67mA and adding a jumper to it (original circuit) it consumes 150mA! I wonder all the lcd shields being sold will end up burning port 10 on the arduinos!Probably not, since I'm guessing that most users are not even aware that their shield "supports dimming"
and even then they are using the stock LiquidCrystal library which does not support dimming.
And as long as they don't mess with the pin that is connected to the transistor, not bad happens and the backlight
is onI received my arduino for less than a week and I´m loving it! I assume it is safe to let it plugged directly on the usb port since it is consuming far less than 500mA.
I use the USB port directly. Excess USB power shouldn't be an issue, but not everyone does things properly.
However, the small little USB extern USB passport type drives pull up to 1 amp as they start up and most
USB ports can run them, so under 500ma will be fine.I Installed the IDE interface on Mageia Linux 3 and it worked without effort, Arduino RPM (Mageia, Mandriva, Fedora, SuSe, etc.) - IDE 1.x - Arduino Forum
Celso Ferrarini
BTW, if you switch to fm's LiquidCrystal library, it is faster and has backlight support
including dimming:
https://bitbucket.org/fmalpartida/new-liquidcrystal/wiki/Home