Hi I’m having bags of fun with the Inky pHAT but struggling to get it working off the board. When it’s connected to the Pi directly with the header it works perfectly. I need it to run separately though, so have followed the pinout diagram exactly and connected it up with male to female jumper leads. The leads make a good connection at both ends and this approach has worked before with the unicorn phat (albeit with fewer connections). I’m absolutely certain all 8 pins are connected properly - am I missing a connection to Ground or something that’s not covered in the pinout diagram? Thanks!
There are more than 8 pins in use. It looks to me like “all” the ground pins need to be connected.
They are all one common ground on the Pi. But more often than not, thats not the case on the Hat or Phat. It’s just not possible to route the tracks on the board to link them all together. That happens when you plug it into the Pi.
It may not be obvious at first glance, but I have learned that the black background on the ground pins means they are in use. I ran into the same issue you did with my LED Shim.
If you look at its pinout, https://pinout.xyz/pinout/led_shim# you’ll see pin 6 and pin 20 are used. I didn’t ground pin 20 and it didn’t work when on jumper wires. ;)
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Aha thanks VERY much for that, that makes sense - really good tip on the pinout diags as well, I see how the GND labels work now. Good. Gonna need some more jumpers! Was halfway to other more fudgy solutions but will connect up the GNDs and give it a go.
A ribbon cable would be the way to go, except for the connector gender issues. And even if the inky had a male header, pins get swapped around / reversed.
How much room do you have?
If you solder two male headers on this
Both headers pointing up. You could then plug the inky into one header and a ribbon cable from the other to the Pi.
It would end up being a really short version of this
Works perfectly with the extra Ground connections, thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.
Insert thumbs up smiley here, lol. =)
I do believe that pHat has the low profile SMT header on the back. You could likely plug this in
And then plug your jumpers into it for a lower profile.
You’d have to switch to female to female jumpers though.