LCD doesn't display desired characters.

(Bear with me, I'm 14 and quite new to Arduino.) I recently purchased the starter kit from the Arduino website, and once it arrived, I immediately got to building the different projects in the book. Although, when it came to the Crystal Ball project, I had assumed that I could engineer something of my own, namely a device that would buzz at a high frequency until toggled off, and display whether or not I had done my chores for that day when connected to power. All was well, the buzzer and toggle have worked, and then came the lcd. I have all of the pins connected as the project tells me, but have connected pin 3 of the lcd to ground through the use of a 10k ohm resistor (To fix a contrast issue and to fill in the absence of the potentiometer). However, when I supply power, instead of displaying the message I desire (That being "Chores Time!"), the lcd simply displays this: pppp. Here is the code I have written (excuse the commented buzzer, it gets really annoying whilst working on the other parts, and also the serial.begin, as I thought that I had a faulty button and wanted to test whether or not I was getting an input from it)

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);
const int buttonPin = 8;
const int buzzer = 13;
int buttonState = 0;
int note = 349;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
lcd.begin(16, 2);
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
pinMode(buzzer, OUTPUT);
lcd.print("Setting Up");
lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
lcd.print("The lcd");
}

void loop() {
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
Serial.print(buttonState);
if (buttonState == 0) {
lcd.print("Chores time!");
//tone(13, note);
}
else {
lcd.print("Chores Done!");
noTone(13);
}
}

  • Start out with a simple program that simply displays something on the first line of the LCD. Do this in setup() and leave loop() blank between the { } brackets.
  • Use a much smaller resistor to set your contrast. You could even start out with 0 ohms (connect pin 3 to GND).
  • Use "code" tags when displaying code. Highlight your code and click on the "code" icon. It's at the left </>.

Don