LCD Corrupted?

The LCD on my 3pi has started experiencing some unusual behaviour. At first, it was trimming a few pixels off the left side of the LCD and now it’s got to a point where the first character is seemingly replaced by this ‘i’ (is supposed to be a 5 - the battery millivolts). It feels like it’s become corrupted in some way and was wondering if there’s a way to fix it?

Hello.

I am sorry you are having problems with your 3pi. Could you tell me how long you were using your 3pi before the LCD started behaving unusually? Could you try loading one of our LCD example programs to see if your code might be the problem? Does adjusting the potentiometer for the contrast affect the LCD’s behavior? Could you try replacing the batteries with new or fully recharged ones and see if that makes a difference? If adjusting the contrast or replacing the batteries does not fix the issue, could you post pictures of the 3pi that show the issue?

- Jeremy

What looks like a small ‘i’ is the right-most pixels on the character ‘5’, which is what it’s trying to display.

I’ve been using my 3pi a lot for probably about a month now, this issue occurs with all code I run on it. Have tried fresh set of batteries with no luck.

How can I go about adjusting the potentiometer?

Thank you for the picture. It looks like the LCD is damaged. It is unclear what might have damaged it, but something as simple as an ESD zap or plugging the LCD in backwards might have done it. If you contact us directly at support@pololu.com with your order information and reference this forum post, we will see how we can help you out.

I do not think adjusting the contrast potentiometer will help, but if you would like to try, you can find the potentiometer labeled in the picture below.

- Jeremy