I picked up an Inky Impression 7.3 (2025) board last week for an InkyPi project. I paired it with a Pi Zero 2 W board that I already had (though needed to solder the GPIO headers).
Everything worked first time, screen was updating etc. The next step was customising the frame involving some measuring and a few test fits.
However once it was all together, the screen would not update.
The screen is physically fine, I’ve checked for any cracks/damage etc. The board is still detected, the LED and buttons scripts work perfectly, the screen doesn’t do anything though.
Quick list of the things I’ve tried:
- Removed and reinstalled the ribbon cable between the board and the screen (in case it got dislodged)
- Rechecked the Pi configurations
- Resoldered the header pins just in-case
- Tried all the different example scripts
- Even pulled out an old Pi 3B+ and a clean SD card and rebuild everything from scratch
The only change was when running the clean.py script the first time, the screen did update once (during the first pass) and displayed random garbage pixels - which suggests the screen itself is good and that it’s a communication issue.
Does anyone have any suggestions on things I can try/double check?
There are a few things you can try:
I never tried the last thing, so use at your own risk. But your SPI signals could deteriorate due to the ribbon cable, so increasing the drive-strength might really be the right thing.
If directly attaching the Pi02W does not help though, then I would suggest writing to support. You can link to this post to document the troubleshooting you already did. The second and third option will probably won’t help you if it doesn’t work directly attached.
Thanks for your response, much appreciated!
Both the Pi boards (the main Zero 2 W and the 3B+ used for testing) were connected directly to the header on the back of the board (or through the extension header provided).
The ribbon I mentioned was between the screen and Inky board itself. I saw a post on here about it possibly disconnecting during shipping, I wondered if this happened while measuring/test fitting so I reseated it.
One other thing I had with the 3B+ was an under voltage warning as the screen was updating. I’m not sure if it’s related or a red herring. The screen did work fine initially on the Zero 2W on USB power…
Taken a further look at this today, before starting I disconnected and reconnected the ribbon cable between the Inky board and the e-ink screen again, booted up the original Pi 2W and it is now working!
I don’t know if my 2nd ribbon cable reseat resolved it (I probably should’ve fired it up before doing anything). I’m going to leave it as-is (not mounted in a frame) under test for a bit and make sure it updates as expected.
For now though, I’m going to mark this as solved! Thanks again for assistance, sorry if it turns out I wasted your time!
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No problem, it could help other people searching for a solution for a similar problem.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking too!
All is well with the screen (apart from some software issues due to limited memory on the pi, like old times!)