Our first test will be just to connect it up to power and see what happens. Plug it into an Arduino and power it up. You should see the following:
Make sure you tweak the contrast potentiometer, if the contrast is all the way down you may not see anything.
Arduino Sketch
Now we must upload some sketch to the Arduino to talk to the LCD. Luckily the LiquidCrystal library is already built in. So we just need to load one of the examples and modify it for the pins we used.If you've changed the pins, you'll want to make a handy table so you can update the sketch properly.
| LCD pin name | RS | EN | DB4 | DB5 | DB6 | DB7 |
| Arduino pin # | 11 | 12 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Open up the File->Examples->LiquidCrystal->HelloWorld example sketch
Now we'll need to update the pins. Look for this line:
LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);
And change it to:
LiquidCrystal lcd(11, 12, 7, 8, 9, 10);
To match the pin table we just made.
Now you can compile and upload the sketch, adjusting the contrast if necessary. (The image below is from a different fruity sketch but it will look similar).
