Got it. The shield I'm using is this one: https://www.adafruit.com/products/243. I set up the LCD using this tutorial http://learn.adafruit.com/character-lcds/wiring-a-character-lcd. Of course I had suspected a conflict between the LCD and either the SD card or the Serial comm since I could place the LCD print code before initialization and it worked fine. I searched around the net to find potential conflicting pins. The last pin I changed was the DB7 from pin 12 to pin 0. I also tried pin 1. The results are the same. Text displays correctly at the beginning of the Setup() function but displays random characters that generally look alike if the code is placed below the initialization of either the SD or the serial. I get that there are potential conflicts. This is a community project and the others had earlier hardwired pins 2-4 so these are not an option. I guess the question is, if the SD card uses pins 10, 11, 12, and 13; and the serial uses 0 and 1, and I'm already using 2-4 for the sensor, and 5,6,7, 8, 9 for the LCD, then the DB7 pin which was on 12 then I placed on 1, then 0 and I had the same results, then I'm stuck without any pins - unless I can use an analog pin, which I haven't tried yet. BTW, the garbage was nothing near what it should have been, randomly place on the screen and odd ascii chars.
thx
