Garbage Text on CFAH2004A

[Leddy]

I've connected my 20x4 to a BasicX microcontroller. I've had everything working great. I've had to shelf the project for a little while and now I'm back at it. I have since moved it around and figured it was time to wire it with a more permanent solution i.e. header pins instead of "fixing" it and having problems with short wires.

I used about 4-5' of Cat5e cable abd soldered it all together. I've connected it to my breadboard and I am able to see text, sort of.

On attaching power I will see text just not *MY* text. I have a loop to right justify some information. I can see that hapening in the middle of the screen(once again not showing the #'s I am expecting but letter sequences)

If I hit the reset button on my chip the screen goes blank and never comes back. In order to fix it I have to detach power and start over.

I'm HOPING my problem is a bad connection somewhere. I was hoping that maybe someone can help pin point it to narrow my search. Any other ideas? Too long of cable? bad chip? bad lcd? bad operator?

Line 1 looks like:
*6!%0$//52.@@@@@@PNP

Similar to a baud rate problem on a serial connection

Sorry for being so long winded!

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[CF Tech]

Try these:

1) slow everything down

2) try putting a small capacitor on the "E" line to ground at the LCD

3) try putting a small (0.1uF) plus large (1.0uF) capacitors between Vcc and Ground at the module.

 

[Leddy]

Just a minor update as I put the project on hold for a few days while I took care of other things. It appears to be a "loose" wire somewhere. I moved the board to another part of my desk and everything worked GREAT, for about 5 seconds when I bumped the breadboard. So now it's time to play columbo!

Breadboard must not like the ultra thin cat5 wire. I'll put some solder on it to beef it up a hair