LCD powered by Arduino

I picked up this LCD from SparkFun, and finally got it working after a few frustrating hours of debugging.

I had trouble getting it running primarily for two reasons. One, I tried to use in on a bread-board, and it really doesn’t work until you solder the wires to the LCD, due to loose connections when plugged directly to the bread-board.

Secondly, I had the pin numbering wrong. Make sure you look at the datasheet, and understand the pin numberings first. You can see a small ‘1’ printed on the PCB next to pin 1. I had my pins numberings reversed, and wasted some time on it.

Now on to doing something interesting with it.