LCD serial backpacks

[Archangel]

well, for some esoteric reasons the thing started to work by itself after a few restart... this I hate
I noticed one time i've got one capacitor disconnected on the Xtal... and it seems the PIC woulndt bother?? replugged it live and it kept working.


since I was sending data from a PC, I assume it was regular RS232.
Tried to get data from my PIC heartbeat system(which is using N9600) and as you said this format is not ok as is, text was garbaged. I'll need a max232 one day to invert signal.

In the little time I had to play with the thing, I wondered how I could send data to drive other functions, else than display text?
Can I do custom characters?
clear screen? etc

Another weird thing is that the LCD believe it's second line is the 3rd, when I send a long text. It start filling 1st, then 3rd, then 2nd, and finally 4th one?

anyways I was just sooooo happy to see some text scrolling


BUT, this morning it doesn't wan't to behave again, showing garbage text with the same steup! arg :/
I suspect power problem from my regulator, although it's rated for 1amp.
it's running way too hot when I plug the backlight of this 4lines monster. I guess this may cause some power problems.
Actually, this is what fried my other LCD! PLugged in too many things, the regulator busted and started shooting 10V or so...smoke show B]

for now I just keep doing short tests.

thanks for the infos!

Ok this thing is written to display with the same commands as used with LCDOUT, so line 1 is 2, line 2 is $C0 or 192, line 3 is $94 or 148, line 4 is $D4 or 212. The LCD we all use having 4 lines are really 2 lines cut in half and displayed as 4 with line 3 being the second half of line 1 and line 4 being the second half of line 2. Put a .01 µF cap on the lcd power terminals. PC COM Port outputs serial data iinverted and must be flipped for use by MAX232 or even a lousey old transistor. Have you tried sending data from another PIC? Just to be sure which post in this thread are you using the code from ? should be post 16.
Oh it likes to boot up with the serial in pin in the HI state and herserin likes to Idle High as well. I have hooked this up to my computer with a max232 and sent large text files and not overrun the buffer, I say this because it did not go to buffer overrun and always ended with the ending text in the file, it went by WAY too fast to read. I think the little Ghosts are 60 hz due to open input on the PIC.