I did use Nicks scanner, and that is why I wonder what the problem is. if the scanner works fine, it has to be something that I am doing on my end because even the serial monitor isn't doing anything, it displays absolutely nothing. I did turn the contrast up and down, and it does change the display, but that is it. oddly, when I do that, it only gives me two white bars across the display(Lines 1 and 3) I would have expected that all 4 lines would have lit up??? is there anything special that I need to do to make the scanner work? If I run the scanner without the display, shouldn't the serial monitor at least say that there is nothing there?