Salvaged LCD

[Crispies]

I have an lcd board I got from an old broken printer a while ago and I ordered an arduino a few days ago. I thought I might use it with the arduino and try and display some text but i cant find anything on the lcd. I cant figure out the pinout but I could be doing it wrong, on google I found found a post somewhere that said to use 5v, ground then ground the contrast and you could see if it works but I cant figure out which pins are which. Any advice? pics of board with lcd http://imgur.com/a/vGgta

[carbon dude oxide]

have you looked under the lcd module for the lcd part number?

[Crispies]

Sorry I did but it also couldnt find anything with that 2918ccb is on a sticker on the back of the lcd.

[alm]

Most likely HD44780 compatible. Based on the PCB, my guess would be (what I call pin 1 is the one on the left in the second picture you provided with the component side down):
pin 1: ground
pin 2: contrast adjust
pin 3: Vcc
pin 4: Vcc
pin 5: ground
pin 6: RS
pin 7: R/W
pin 8: E
pin 9-16: D0-D7

One of the grounds and one of the Vcc pins will be for the backlight (if available). Putting 5V across them with say a 100 ohm series resistor should make the backlight light up. No guarantees for correct polarity, though . If pin 5 is connected to pin 1 (the ground plane), then I would say my guess for the power pins should be correct. No way to be sure about the data lines (I assumed standard pinout) without trying though. There are plenty of Arduino sketches to drive an HD44780-compatible LCD, but I would suggest to start with a display with a proper datasheet if this is your first time driving an LCD. That removes a bunch of unknowns from the equation. For example, it's possible that this LCD is not even HD44780 compatible.

It would be useful to have the board in the printer it was connected to.

[Crispies]

Hey thanks man that worked. Its a 20x2 if you were curious. The printer was a big complicated monstrosity so I'm not really sure how it all went together anymore. But when i get my arduino try and figure out the data lines. I wanted to get this one working instead of just buying one since its a nice little board all together with buttons I can just use it in a project.