Clearing your Inky display best practices

Discussion Raspberry Pi
1

Hi,

I’m enjoying my new Inky Impression 4". But one thing I’m not clear about is why exactly ‘clearing’ (or ‘cleaning’) an Inky display matters.

This video says it’s good practice to do it, and I’ve noticed both a clear.py and clean.py in the official examples.

Is it simply to reduce/remove ghosting ahead of the next image rendered? Much like how a Kindle/Kobo will occasionally refresh itself to ‘clean’ the text. Or does it help prevent long-term ghosting, or somehow else help with longevity?

I’m making a visual clock that shows a different image every hour (or few hours) based on a CRON job. Both clear.py and clean.py take over a minute to run on my setup, so I’d ideally not do this every hour.

My clock only runs during waking hours (5am–8pm), so I suppose I could just run the clear.py once before bedtime. I just don’t know if that’s going to lessen the lifetime of my display.

2

I investigated this problem already and did not find any hard facts (e.g. something in a datasheet) about this “cleaning/clearing”. Waveshare recommends this as a standard-procedure, and CircuitPython has this built in.

Personally, I used an InkyImpression (5.7") without clearing for a long time. What I can see is ghosting, but this highly depends on what I put on the screen. If you are rendering images that are not similar (i.e. have more or less different pixel-values) you should not see any ghosting.

My plan is to add cleaning on a regular basis (e.g. once a week), but since this has no high priority I doubt it will make it soon to the top of the list.

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