Hi All,
My Inkyphat display + Rpasberry Pi Zero WH combo has now been happily running since January 21st. Every minute it displays the date and time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Every 15 minutes it interrogates my Pi-powerd NTP server and displays the high-precision time in red.
According to an online duration calculator, that’s 283,650 updates/display updates! I’ll keep it running for as long as I can, but really, the display is an amazing piece of kit and well worth it!
Good grief, and I thought we put them through their paces!
I’d be interested to see what happens around the million cycles mark, that’s where it should get interesting. You can’t really get away from the physics of moving ink particles up/down in suspension, and what wear and tear that might cause over time, but I don’t really have any idea how wear sets in and what it looks like.
LOL, I’ll let you know if/when it reaches 1 million - I’m sure it will. So far the text seems as clear and responsive as when I first got it.
I should also mention that in the early part of the year it was regularly operating at around 9C and during the recent heatwave around 32C, so it’s getting a good workout. My attic office is renowned for extremes of temperature :)
See you at 1 million!
Update!
The black part of the Inkyphat is still going strong at 434,664 display updates, and I was impressed to see that id had maintained the display for over a week despite the Pi Zero locking up unexpectedly.
The red part is starting to show signs of wear/degradation after 86,933 cycles - the line of text at the bottom of the display is having difficulty forming the characters and overall, red seems to be slower to respond on the entire display. It tends to flicker. I ran the clean script several times but this seemed to make no difference.
However, bearing in mind that it’s running 365/24/7 I’m still very impressed with the Inkyphat and when/if red fails I’ll just change that line to black and I’ll no doubt carry on the million mark! See you there!