No output to display

After connecting up a

Standard HD44780 LCD

to power and being able to adjust the brightness, the next step was to get i to display some text by connecting the display to an ESP32-S2 Thing Plus.

To do that I needed to connect to these pins on the display:

LCD Pin name	RS	EN	DB4	DB5	DB6	DB7
LCD Pin	4	6	11	12	13	14

I planned to connect these LCD pins to the range available on the ESP32-S2 Thing Plus 3,34,33,37,35,36

Thus:

const int rs=3; // LCD RS pin

const int en=34; // LCD Enable pin

const int d4=33; // LCD data bit 4 pin

const int d5=37; // LCD data bit 5 pin

const int d6=35; // LCD data bit 6 pin

const int d7=36; // LCD data bit 7 pin

and to initialise:

LiquidCrystal lcd(rs, en, d4, d5, d6, d7);

The size of the display is defined buy:

lcd.begin(16,2);

and then to display text:

lcd.print(“Hello world!”)

My code compiles ok, but I get not text on the LCD display?

– I triple checked my wiring and even tried other ports (no luck)

– I defined each pin via pinmode(rs,OUTPUT); for example (noluck)

Seems like the best solution is go for this:

I2C LCD Backpack for 1602 to 2004 LC

which basically removed the need for individual ports in favour of using SDA and SCL to do the communications. In fact, I probably should have bought this to start with:

Gravity: I2C LCD1602 Arduino LCD Display Module (Blue)

which has the backpack module included!

In the long run this is a better bet as it saves and stack of pins on the ESP32-S2 Thing Plus being consumed.

I did notice that all the GPIO pins on the ESP32-S2 Thing Plus are 3.3V and perhaps the LCD display requires 5V? I couldn’t find any definitive on that.