Inky Impression 13 not working with PiSugar3

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Lately I’ve been playing with a Inky Impression 7 and 13 inch. Since I want my project to be portable, I’ve bought a Pisugar 3 since it doesn’t use any GPIO pins and I am still able to mount the Pi (Zero 2w) on the board.

I am able to run the Pi + Sugar with no problems on the 7 inch screen, but when I use it on the 13 inch screen, most of the time I am not able to update the screen (using the examples).

A strange thing I came across is when I disconnect the battery on the PiSugar and reconnect it (I’ve soldered a connector on it, normally the battery is hard-wired) the PiSugar (and therefor also the Pi) auto-boots. In this situation the examples are running and everything seems to work fine.

Here again, when I do a soft shutdown and restart everything manually, the screen doesn’'t update no more. The examples for led and buttons do work in every situation.

When I completely remove the PiSugar and directly power the Pi, everything works fine.

Can someone tell me why the 13” screen doesnt work with the Pi + Sugar config, but the 7” does?

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Very interesting. I was considering buying the pisugar 3 for this exact setup. I wanted to use the witty pi 4 mini but that and the 13.3” screen both use pin 17 so I don’t know if that’ll be an issue(I’m a complete noob with all of this). It seems like the pisugar would solve all my issues, but it has mixed reviews with its connections… but if it doesn’t even work on the larger screen than it looks like I’m back to square 1 again.

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I also bought the witty pi because I didn’t check GPIO usage. One other problem with the witty is that is using the gpio pins, so to connect it to the Inky impression you’ll need header extenders.

I’ve ordered a new pisugar + and zero w to make sure it is not a hardware issue.

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