Arduino Starter Kit LCD Issue - Boxes rather than characters

Other Hardware Displays
1

Hello,

Apologies for this post, as it seems incredibly common. However, through all my searching I was unable to find a mistake with my own wiring.

As said in the title, I'm getting a row of black boxes rather than characters when hooking up the LCM1602C V2.1 LCD to my Uno R3 Arduino.

Here are some pictures of my wiring:

Imgur

Here you can see I've got pin 16 to ground, 15 to a 220 ohm resistor, 1 to ground, and 2 to 5v.

My next step was to attach wires 3 and 5 to ground. (I know 3 is meant to be attached to a potentiometer, but it adds clutter, complicates the wiring, the contrast is fine like this anyway, and attaching it to a potentiometer didn't fix anything when I attempted it)

Imgur

From here the display still works, but the boxes appear (as far I know, this is normal at this step)

Imgur

My final step was to add the 6 data wires. I struggled to get a good picture of this without too much clutter, but hopefully these two from different perspectives should show where everything is going:

Imgur
Imgur

My final step was to run the following code:

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>
LiquidCrystal lcd(2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7);

void setup() {
  lcd.begin(16, 2);
  lcd.print("hello world");
  // put your setup code here, to run once:

}

void loop() {
  // put your main code here, to run repeatedly:

}

.

And yet, no dice. Still just get the black boxes seen earlier.

(This image is shared on Google Drive because for whatever reason imgur stopped working)

I've triple checked my wiring but don't see any reason that it shouldn't be working. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Are you sure your program is successfully being uploaded to your Arduino? You could add the code from the 'blink' example to your LCD code to find out.

Don

3

Yep, blink code executes when I add it to the file.