There were nine pins on an LCD salvaged from an AT&T CL84209 cordless phone system. I found two candidates for its +5V power supply pin, but an experiment found that they both seemed to work. I doubt these are both +5V supply pins, as I expect the manufacturer would have removed unnecessary redundancy in the interest of cost. I hypothesize that one of them is the actual +5V supply pin, and the other one allowed +5V to leak through the circuit as an accidental side effect. Trying to guess which is which, I returned to recording analog behavior with my Saleae Logic 8.

For reference, here's the behavior of handset LCD start-up that I want to replicate for pins 6-9. (Channels 4-7.)

The first experiment was to turn on the system without connecting any of the four mystery pins.

Channel 5 picked up 3.3V from elsewhere in the circuit. Channel 4 less so at 3V. The other two pins would sporadically spike up to one of those two voltages. This is definitely wrong, but I wanted to rule out the possibility this mystery LCD controller had a built-in voltage booster.

The next experiment was to put +5V (well, 4.8V) on Channel 4.

This looks much better. Channel 5 and 6 behavior looks correct, or at least close enough to my eyes. I don't see anything that makes me think "Hmm, maybe this pin needs an external inductor, resistor, or capacitor." Such as channel 7, who is trying and failing to hold 5V so I think it needs an external capacitor.

Then I switched +5V over to channel 7:

Channels 5 and 6 are again working roughly as expected, which explains why LCD segments look good no matter where +5V comes in. However, I see a weird multi-step behavior on channel 4 that is not ideal. Out of my options, I think I should put +5V on channel 4 and put a little capacitor (100nF ceramic) on channel 7:

Yeah, I think that's my best approximation to the ideal behavior. The only difference I see is that, on the original data, channel 4 started with 3.3V then jumped up to 5V upon startup. It seems to be under LCD startup control, but I don't see how. Maybe there's something contributing elsewhere on the circuit board? I know there are still mysteries on this circuit buried underneath the handset LCD, something I intend to investigate later. For now, I hope putting +5V on pin 6 (channel 4) before initialization would not damage the LCD, because I plan on doing that for further exploration. Starting with a comparison between these two LCDs both responding to I2C 0x3E.