Display demos not filling pico Explorer display

Support
#1

I have a pico Explorer and am running the demo programs for the display, demo.py, rainbow.py & thermometer.py. The pico has had the pimoroni version of MicroPython added to it (downloaded yesterday 28-Feb-21).

When running any of the programs the display area does not fill the screen, there are bands to the left, right and top of the display area that are unused. I’d estimate that only 50% of the screen area is used.

Test code added to demo.py shows width and height are 240 and 135. Is this correct? How can the whole screen be used (it looks square so I’d expect width to = height).

Orienting the Explorer board with the pico top left, the screen bottom right with connections at the bottom, the display is shown rotated 90degrees clockwise (would require a 90degrees counter-clockwise rotation to be orientated to match the explorer). Is this expected?

#2

It sounds like you’re trying to run the Pico Display Pack examples on Explorer which will be why they’re the wrong size, the Explorer examples are here:

The Explorer screen is indeed 240x240 pixels :)

#3

Mmmm, are the Display Pack examples and Explorer examples not display size independent? The code I was looking at began with getting the display width and height which I presume get the actual display parameters, making the code that follows display size independent(?).

However I could have used the wrong code. I have since got and run some Explorer code from the forums and it displays correctly in the Explorer display so I’m happy that is working OK now.

#4

Good stuff!

I believe the display sizes are baked into the respective libraries, so if you’re calling picodisplay instead of picoexplorer it will get_width and get_height as 240 and 135.