Whaa??

I don’t know what just happened… all of my connections looked good on the board, so I started testing the pins of the NodeMCU while it was running, in hopes of bring able to detect a short. Funny enough, while doing this, I think I shorted the NodeMCU’s RST pin, because something made it reboot and when it did the damnable screen was working again… and my test message was looping. I also want to point out that the dozen or so times I pressed the RST button caused the computer to reboot, but didn’t refresh the screen’s behaviour.

Not knowing what I did, or why its now working I’m not going to call this a victory… I will, however, accept it as a turn of good fortune!
From what I’ve read, the full boxes and garbage characters are a known issue with the LCD screen, where it will spontaneously display garbage characters instead of the data you’re asking for… that’s one heck of a “known issue” with a product on the market, if you ask me… apparently you just need to disconnect-reconnect it… easier said that done once you’ve soldered it to your motherboard.

As far as next steps go, now that I’ve got a working screen, I’m going to reload Marla and see if things are going to continue doing what they should be doing…

… and Marla is displaying data on the LCD and uploading to the spreadsheet.
… Make that was displaying.

Top line is now locked, displaying humidity data, while the second line is just printing a loop of garbage.
After reset the LCD is displaying a16x2 grid of the letter w… data is still uploading to the internet…

I’m taking a break.