Is it broken?

Hi everyone. This is my first post and hope the answer to this is an easy one. I picked up the Arduino Experimentation Kit V2 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Arduino-Experimentation-Kits2-with-genuine-arduino-UNO-R3-Board-/200906072207?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ec6ef608f) and pulled out the LCD screen. First thing I noticed is that it had no header pins on it. I dug through my parts here in the shop and easily soldered on some header pins to place the LCD into a breadboard. The problem I am having is, the LCD seems dead. No back light when power is applied. I looked through the kit box again for a manual or something that may reference something I may be missing on this, but no booklet of any kind was in the kit. Found it odd. So my question is, is there something I may be missing here? Pin 1 (Gnd) and Pin 2 (5V) on the LCD seems very common. Any advice?

sencorp,
Welcome.
No probably not. You didn't hook up the 10K potentiometer, one leg to +5V other to Gnd, sweep to pin three,
then adjust until you get a line of black rectangles in the top row.
I would recommend a book or an online tutorial, here is one Getting started with Arduino! – Chapter Zero | tronixstuff.com.
Adafruit.com has anotherhttp://learn.adafruit.com/category/learn-arduino, most dealers and some E-Bay sellers have them for their products. YouTube has dozens of videos on the subject.
Read the sticky "How to use this Forum" at the top of each page, then come on back if my suggestions don't help.
TomJ

Pin 1 (Gnd) and Pin 2 (5V) on the LCD seems very common.

This is indeed very common and is most likely correct for your display but, as mentioned in the previous post, you need to connect pin 3 as well or your screen will be blank even with the device working properly.

In most cases the backlight is not powered by pins 1 and 2 but instead by pins 15 and 16. You may or may not need an external series resistor depending on the design of your LCD module. Some displays are virtually unusable without a backlight so you should get this working first.

Here's an outline of what to do:
(1) Get the backlight working (pins 15 and 16)
(2) Get the power and contrast working (pins 1, 2, and 3).
(3) Connect the LCD signal and control lines (pins 4,5,6,11,12,13 and 14)
(4) Display a static message on the top line of the display. (Leave loop() empty between the brackets).

Don

Thanks everyone. The device is up and working. I am working on a temp / humidity sensor that will output to both the lcd screen, as well and fire off the info to a back end web page via the net. Temp sensor and display are working great now. Im off to get the web portal up and running next. Thanks again guys for helping me over that speed bump.