2x16 LCD + LCD Smartie + Arduino + LCD4bitmod

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

I'm facing some issues of displaying garbage characters or the screen totally messed up with Character LCD using the following h/w & s/w :-

I tried the 2x16 LCD + Arduino + LCD Smartie on both Win 7 machine & Win XP / Vmware Fusion on Mac Snow Leopard..

I found the following differences using a 19200 baud and all the other settings are default ( 12ms refresh interval )

  • On the vmware \ Win XP on Mac

  • 1 liner winamp graph works fine ( 2nd line no scrolling )

  • 8 bar tiny graph works fine with scrolling mp3 title name / song name

  • text scrolling works fine

  • all 2 liner graphs is garbage

  • lowering the speed to 9600 produced the same results as above

  • On Win 7 direct usb connect :-

  • scrolling text seems to be blur/hard to read

  • All graphs is NOT working or with garbage character using winamp plugins

It seems the indirect USB connection (via vmware) is working better than a direct USB connection...

Have anyone got the Arduino + LCD Smartie combo working and can you pls share the settings..

Thank you

2

LCD 4bit mod library

I would start here. Most LCD libraries, including the LCD4bit library do not properly initialize the LCD controller. Try reworking your code to use the current Arduino LiquidCrystal library.

Don

3

I managed to solved this issue by replacing the LCD Module..

I use another 2x16 LCD Module and slowly increase the LCD Smartie refresh interval (in ms) until no more garbage character... my setting was 70ms.

I guess my previous LCD module is not fast enough to refresh the LCD and I set the Refresh Internal too high at 12ms...