Need Help Getting Info About An LCD Screen

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1

Back a year and a half ago, I (and a few other people) raided our college’s lab for outdated/non-working things. Blah, blah, blah, and then I got an LCD screen from some unknown board, where the LCD is on it’s own separate board. When I looked up the numbers, the only datasheet I found on it was this one:

http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet- … -5121.html

Might it be of the exact everything of the ones carried by Sparkfun? I guess what I really want to know is if I can take the salvaged screen and directly drop it in place of the ones by Sparkfun? I know I’d have to set it up as 24 characters and 2 lines.

Or perhaps you guys can help me find a better datasheet?

2

I can tell the pin out is the same except for [Sparkfun’s 16x2 LCD has 2 more pins, +4.2V for backlight and GND for Backlight. Looks like the one you have doesn’t have a backlight.](https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/GDM1602K.pdf)

3

Why not give it a try ? It would seem that the LCD takes 5v for it’s controller and 9v for it’s display. If you’ve got some easy way to manipulate the enable, strobe/clock and the 8 data lines you could try to initialize and talk to it using the common protocols. See what, if anything, works. What can you lose, as it sits it’s fairly useless ?

4

I got it into a bread board and used alligator clips to connect some switches to the pins. Turns out that 5V is just enough to get the display running. I also tried piping data to it. I don’t have an ASCII chart, so I’m unsure if it was correct. It also seemed to keep the courser on line one character one and shifted back old character to the right. It then turned off on me. Probably power loss: the power connector they provided with the kit sucks.

UPDATE

Turns out it was turning off because a few connections were shorting to the power supply. It also started acting correctly after that. I downloaded an ASCII - Binary chart to reference. I was able to put derogatory words on the screen (okay, just one). I need to run one more test, but on a different screen, to make sure the next weird thing is consistent on all screens.