Display-o-tron trouble getting going

I bought a display-o-tron. Software all installed following the setup command without any trouble, but when I run any of the samples (or my own simple script for hello world) I found half the display lights up, and no text appears. Basically the LEDs for the left hand side of the display illuminate, but not the right. I can change the colour of them with the RGB command (although it seems to interpret as BGR?) but no text ever appears.

I assumed a faulty board, and Pimoroni kindly sent me another, but it behaves exactly the same. Now assuming my Pi is perhaps faulty, I brought the display to work and connected to another Pi 2 B (using my existing SD image) but it’s the same!

Now, I’m figuring that it’s pretty unlikely two display boards are broken in exactly the same way - likewise two Pi’s - so I’m assuming it’s maybe a software problem.

I’m not getting any error messages though! Any suggestions for tests I can do to ensure everything is configured correctly?

Oh, actually a different bit of googling led me to someone with identical trouble: Display-o-tron not working as expected

I’ll double check which samples I am using later on and see if it’s just me being dumb!

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I was going to suggest exactly this problem! The combined libraries/examples can be a little confusing.

Yep, I was being an idiot (I’d not really cottoned on that the 3k and hat were two different things…

Anyway, examples worked, and the basics of my own project are working too. All good!