Very dim GLCD

Controllers Smoothie
1

I’m commisioning one of the smoothie boards I got during the group delta purchase early this year. I got the 1.0a board, the GLCD adapter and 5V regulators for the Smoothie and adapter, and the GLCD itself from Uberclock. I have several of these GLCDs to test with. All of them are incredibly dim on the above setup (new smoothie, GLCD adapter) and I thought the vreg might be the issue so I tested it and it works fine.

On my first smoothie I made my own harness for the GLCD. I don’t recall it being so dim but its been awhile and I can’t check now. The same GLCDs on other printers is nice and bright but moved over to my smoothie, it is almost impossible to read. I tried setting Contrast in the menu settings but it doesn’t “stick” (i.e. the contrast always resets to 0. Perhaps that’s the issue?

cheers.
Michael

Imported from wikidot

2

I should mention I have a 1amp 5V regulator on the Smoothie itself. I put a .5amp regulator on the GLCD adapter. It is equally dim with or without the .5amp regulator on the adapter. Do I need a 1amp reg on the adapter?

3

to close this thread it turns out he had a bad Vreg on the GLCD breakout board.

4

I checked this forum’s history regarding poor contrast on a RepRapDiscount GLCD.
Sounds like I found something here.

How do I check that this Vreg is my problem also and how do I fix this problem?
Thanks for your support!
LD in Montréal

5

Note that I have a 1A Voltage regulator soldered to the SmoothieBoard.
24v coming in.
No difference running with USB or standalone.

6

This thread grabbed my attention because I also had a very dim LCD on first powering up my Smoothieboard.

With the board only plugged into USB the LCD was very very dim, once I supplied 12v to VBB (I have a 1a 5V reg) the LCD is perfect.

This is not surprising in hindsight but I thought I’d put it here in case anyone else has plugged in their board for the first time and gone HUH?

Moriquendi