I wish there was a way to lock the thread as not only is it quite old ( 5 years), but it was marked solved.
No new questions for help/support should be added to this thread.
Keep in mind that many things have changed over this 5 year period and there are other better solutions available now that were not available back then.
Also, many of the new posts are for issues unrelated to the original post/thread.
My advice is to start a new thread if you want help with your issue and/or look for and use my hd44780 library which is available in the IDE library manager. There are many threads on the forum about it.
--- bill