Inky Impression display no longer updates - Pi 5, Debian 12 bookworm

Support
1

Hi, I’m new here so bear with me for formatting/length of post.

I bought my inky impression 7.3” about a year ago now, and have it attached to a pi5 (bit clunky I know). When I first got it, it worked perfect. I’ve been a little busy this last year, but finally got some time to do some side projects again. Unfortunately, my inky impression no longer is able to update the display, it’s stuck on the doomscrollgirl picture :(

It didn’t particularly show any errors at first only this output:

python image.py --file images/inky-7.3-ships.jpg 
Detected 7-Colour 800x480 (AC073TC1A)
/home/steve/.virtualenvs/pimoroni/lib/python3.11/site-packages/inky/inky_ac073tc1a.py:224: UserWarning: SPI: Cannot disable chip-select!
  warnings.warn("SPI: Cannot disable chip-select!")
/home/steve/.virtualenvs/pimoroni/lib/python3.11/site-packages/inky/inky_ac073tc1a.py:285: UserWarning: Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for 1.00s
  warnings.warn("Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for {:0.2f}s".format(timeout))
/home/steve/.virtualenvs/pimoroni/lib/python3.11/site-packages/inky/inky_ac073tc1a.py:285: UserWarning: Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for 0.40s
  warnings.warn("Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for {:0.2f}s".format(timeout))
/home/steve/.virtualenvs/pimoroni/lib/python3.11/site-packages/inky/inky_ac073tc1a.py:285: UserWarning: Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for 45.00s
  warnings.warn("Busy Wait: Held high. Waiting for {:0.2f}s".format(timeout))

So I tried a few methods to resolve the issue which all failed and I still see the doomscrollgirl! There was one thing which worked however, and that was buttons.py from the examples, which makes me believe that the connection isn’t completely broken? (But may be why it’s failing!). Regardless, these were the methods I tried to fix the problem:

  1. Checked SPI is properly enabled, plus rebooting
  2. Tried running with sudo
  3. Uninstalled inky, and reinstalled it (I used the instructions from the github page)
  4. Pip installed the latest GPIO library
  5. I checked the kernel messages which stated: 
    1. [    3.207933] dw_spi_mmio 1f00050000.spi: there is not valid maps for state default
[  336.591084] spidev spi0.0: setup: unsupported mode bits 40
[  531.100523] OF: overlay: WARNING: memory leak will occur if overlay removed, property: /axi/pcie@1000120000/rp1/spi@50000/status
[  542.471879] spidev spi0.0: setup: unsupported mode bits 40
[  728.343626] OF: overlay: WARNING: memory leak will occur if overlay removed, property: /axi/pcie@1000120000/rp1/spi@50000/status
[  803.443632] spidev spi0.0: setup: unsupported mode bits 40
  6. I confirmed the SPI devices are there
  7. I updated my raspi OS/Kernel
    1. Currently running / Debian 12 bookworm / aarch64 Linux 6.12.47+rpt-rpi-2712
  8. Verified firmware config was as required.
  9. Did a few reboots, and at this point I essentially gave up!

Not entirely sure if i’m asking for a miracle fix, or just confirmation that the screen is somehow busted and I can somehow send it back for repairs but any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!