Defective LCD Shield?

[Shabba]

Howdy all,

I bought the Experiment Kit for Arduino UNO (ARD-SK2) kit which came with LCD keypad Shield (SHIELD-LCD).

I have started to play around with it and there is some chatter going on on the arduino forums (http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=96747.0) about some of the shields being faulty.
They have a script which detects if the LCD is faulty.

"So far, the "broken" designs connected D10 directly to the base of a NPN transistor, this will cause a short when D10 is set to HIGH"

I have downloaded this and run it which lights up the LCD with the message "BL Circuit BAD"
Image attached.

Is this correct or not something to worry about?

Cheers

[ober]

Howdy all,

I bought the Experiment Kit for Arduino UNO (ARD-SK2) kit which came with LCD keypad Shield (SHIELD-LCD).

I have started to play around with it and there is some chatter going on on the arduino forums (http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=96747.0) about some of the shields being faulty.
They have a script which detects if the LCD is faulty.

"So far, the "broken" designs connected D10 directly to the base of a NPN transistor, this will cause a short when D10 is set to HIGH"

I have downloaded this and run it which lights up the LCD with the message "BL Circuit BAD"
Image attached.

I don think is defected, there are plenty of method to design a circuit. As highlighted, if D10 is high it will provide quite a some current to ground via the transistor. But on the other hands, why making D10 high at the first place?
If you want to off the LCD back light, make D10 output and make it LOW.
If you want to ON the LCD back light, make D10 input, it will automatically pull high by the on board resistor.

[Shabba]

Thanks for the reply.

I was just checking up on the shields online and found the forum post so thought I would check to see just incase it was faulty and would damage the arduino.

Thanks for clearing it up