Hi all! I recently got my hands on a Badgeware Badger thingy to tinker with, and I was wondering if something I’ve noticed is an issue that can hopefully be fixed or worked around. I’ve attached some pictures to hopefully illustrate this:
It’s subtle, but it seems like the grayscale levels are what I’d describe as high contrast, each closer to black and white than the middle shades. On the first picture showing BadgeOS, I think the mass storage and hydration icons on the bottom show the dark/black and light/white similarity well. For the second picture, I wrote some code to make a quick pattern with the levels, and it almost looks like there is just black and white represented with the greys hard to make out. (In reality as well, I have to lean in close to distinguish the squares)
Of course, as shown in BadgeOS, dithering is able to produce a good gray background without much trouble- but in my application, I’m hoping to lean into pixel-by-pixel shades and boundaries that wouldn’t work as well with dithering.
Comparing to the product page and other photos around, (of course, keeping in mind likely different lighting conditions) it’s hard to tell if this is the intended set of shades. I’ll describe my specific case below, but that is the general inquiry!
I’ve been programming my unit from scratch with the repositories as reference, (genuinely, thank you all for making that available, it’s a life saver) ensuring that the LUTs and configuration are identical even with a different process sending data. For the sake of pictures, I put the latest OS version back on the unit with the pattern one being from scratch. I was debating tweaking the LUT values to experiment with making better grey scales, but without knowing the specific model of display I decided to not do that. (I suspect it is a GDEM027Q72 though?) I don’t remember if the contrast issue described here was present out of the box, but I don’t believe any subtle damage could’ve been done to the display with my own code using the same values. While programming and while the pictures were taken, the battery remained disconnected. Maybe there’d be something electrical having an issue with the battery unplugged, but I have doubts there too. I haven’t plugged it back in as of writing. I also don’t think it’d be significant, but the local room temperature is 19.5°C. I did try adjusting the repeat number found in the LUT from 0 to 3, but each looked about the same.
An interesting thing that happened briefly with the list icon in BadgeOS, probably elsewhere on the screen too, was the dark grey shade in general being lighter, close to “middle grey.” The check mark being that shade made the difference pretty obvious. This happened when I uploaded the official release file for the first time after replacing it and noticed a difference that stayed around after the refresh sequence. On disconnecting and reconnecting the power, though, the levels were back to usual and I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. I don’t have an explanation for that myself, but maybe someone could get an idea from it?
That’s all for now! Thank you for reading, I do hope to present my code thingy at some point :)
