I recently purchased an inky frame device with the standard accessory kit, including a 3xAA battery pack.
I was able to program it and get that working nicely, but I am running into issues where the inky frame will only boot up when power is applied via the USB port. It doesn’t need an actual USB host (I’ve tried this with my USB wall wart), and it will happily continue running my program on battery power after booting, but for the initial boot, a momentary application of +5V to the usb connector seems to be required.
Any idea what might be causing this behavior? Do I have a faulty board?
Could it be related to my usage of the hardware RTC via inky_frame.sleep_for ? Does that prevent the device from resetting and rebooting on battery power until the timer is up?
The Inky Frame’s design is that it does not power on if you apply battery power only. This does seem non-intuitive to me but it’s the way it is and it’s consistent across all three sizes. The only things that will wake it from its slumber on battery power are the five buttons, the external trigger going high or the alarm signal from the real time clock chip.
If you’re running one of the older, non Inky Frame specific MicroPythons then those wakeups will need to last around 1-2 seconds.
gotcha. It took me a while to figure out the nuances of how this thing behaves differently when it’s on battery versus on USB power (kind of annoying to not be able to develop anything relying on shutdown and RTC wake while plugged in to USB). I think I was able to get it behaving the way I want it to for my usage, finally, though!
I know the feeling. The hardware has been ahead of the library support for Inky Frames. The inky_frame module is useful and examples are tidier now with inky_helper use.