Quote Originally Posted by skimask View Post
A few questions...
Why the double-pullup resistor on RA4? Same on MCLR?
Since I have alot of 10K resistors handy and didnt want to search for 4K7 in my big pile of resistors I used two 10K in parallel to get 5K ..and since its only a pullup its not very critical anyway.

Pin 9 on the PIC should go to pin 6 on the LCD...
Almost looks like the LCD needs to be jammed in there a bit farther...
The pinstrip I used have pretty long (and very thin) pins so its no problem.

Also, you really need more decoupling cap's... a couple across Vdd/Vss on both the PIC and the LCD (especially the LCD in this case) wouldn't hurt.
You mean closer ? Well, I guess I could do that just to get that possibility out of the way, but I dont think it should be any problem, I use a very clean powersource and have one cap on the breadboard over Vss and Vdd.

Ok, I missed the part where you said you swapped over to an 'F84A.
Those 1st 3 solder joints on the LCD don't look that good either, could be the lighting though...
The leftmost ones ? its actually flux that went white when I pressed the testpins from my multimeter to see if I really got some power to the LCD ..So no problem there, but I admit that the solderings on the ICSP-connector looks like crap ..I just made a cable between the Pickit2 and a pinstrip very quickly since I was tired of connecting and disconnecting the pickit2 all the time.