Inky pHAT Yellow very dark

Support
1

I’m having an odd issue with my new Inky pHAT Yellow, ordered from Adafruit due to being a US tinkerer. Unfortunately it seems whenever I use the included code from Pimoroni and specify the display as yellow, I get this incredibly dark result that’s VERY low-contrast, like so:

image
image.jpg1109×1478 395 KB

But on a whim after testing and running the clean.py script a few times, I decided to try using the ‘red’ setting, just in case. It’s not perfect, but at least better? It’s still only more of a contrasting grey than a real yellow without very bright lighting.

Now with both of these I was shining a bright LED light directly on them. The contrast is even worse in regular light, nowhere near the contrast shown in the photos of the product on the website. Is my Inky pHAT defective? This is using a Pi Zero W with 1A power. I’m concerned because I wanted to be able to use this with a LiPo SHIM for use in a convention, with timed rotation of the panel every say 30 minutes or with a button SHIM soldered to the bottom of the pi to allow swapping displays (assignable via a bottle app over wifi AP). Or am I better off switching to a red one instead?

2

Is this with the new Inky library, or the original Inky pHAT library?

Is your room/environment particularly hot/cold at the moment?

3

This is the new library, following the guide on the website to curl for it, installed all the libraries and support. The new one is the one with the wHAT support too, correct?

And no, just average room temp, probably around 68-70F-ish generally? Would warmer do better? I can try and slightly warm it above my computer exhaust and run it if that’d help.

4

Sounds like there could be something awry with the new library. I’ll dig up a yellow Inky pHAT and see if I get similar results.

5

Thank you! I appreciate you checking into it; I got super nervous when I saw it.

6

Yikes! Indeed I’m getting results not dissimilar to yours! I’d dare say it’s more black than yellow.

7

Definitely what I was thinking at first when I saw it, aha. I didn’t post the photo due to my original upload limit, but telling it it was red is ‘better’, but it’s still more just pale. The yellow definitely looks to be there! Just with black in the way almost. I don’t know enough about how those work heh! I’m glad I’m not alone in testing at least! Is there anything I can do to help?

8

Okay I believe I’ve fixed it. These steps should get you onto the fixed library in the interim:

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/inky
cd inky/library
sudo python setup.py install

I’ll get this released as soon as possible!

1 Like
9

Will this properly overwrite the one installed via the bash script?

10

Doesn’t look it… I did cd inky/library and imported from there, since it’d pull from local before installed. Working with that, at least, worked! I’m not super familiar with replacing packages installed; is there something I need to change or delete?

Edit: I used find to find the python 2.7 and 3.5 installations and removed them then reran setup.py install for both versions. Working now!

1 Like
11

Ooh you might have had to run an apt and pip uninstall but it seems you’ve got it covered!

1 Like
12

Hi I just purchased a brand new yellow inkyPhat and I am experiencing the same dull yellow color issues described. I followed the installation steps described under https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-inky-phat.

I tried the steps in the solution but no luck. Would appreciate some help.