I just received my Devterm A06 last night night, put it together and found that I have nothing on the monitor. No backlight, no images if I shine a light onto the monitor, nothing. I let it sit for half an hour to see if it was expanding the filesystem or something like that, and still nothing. Yes I did email the developers last night but only been12 hours now so they may not have seen it yet.
But this makes me ask a question or two…
#1 will a Raspberry Pi DSI cable work, that may be my quickest way to get a get to see if I broke the included cable. I will check for breaks in the cable later tonight, didn’t have time last night.
#2 will this display work on a Pi4 in the DSI connection? I have a Pi4 that I could use to troubleshoot the display and cable if it is safe to do this.
Or should I download and write the latest OS image to the card to make sure I didn’t get a bad image?
I also tried using the HDMI connection, but I seem to recall that this may not be functional out of the box. Or it just didn’t work. I don’t have a Pi CM3 carrier board to try the Core module in, so no idea if this goes deeper than the display. I also do not have a CM3 to try in my Devterm, don’t know anyone that owns one.
I was powered by batteries that were charged in an external charger, I also tried batteries plus USB C, and just the USB C power. Also tried with just processor carrier board and core directly to display without extension board or battery holder. I did have green power LED so no power shorts.
I didn’t even think of plugging a keyboard in. Just tried it and nothing. So I downloaded the a06 image and flashed it with Etcher. Now I get display and the external keyboad Caps, and Num lock lights are working.
I guess it was just a bad image on the card and I should have done this last night.
As far as the orange LED, I did not get that and just figured it was from the batteries being fully charged on an external charger. I don’t have a USB C charger with me, so that will have to wait until later to check.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I had the same issue – received my A-06 last week, assembled it this weekend…nothing except a green light (no batteries yet, Amazon is late). I took it all apart, yadda yadda, tried the HDMI, puzzled over the UART debugger (are there instructions anywhere for that?) to no avail. On the suggestion here I flashed a new SD card and it came up in a few seconds. Sounds like the new batch of machines has some QC problems with the SD cards.
Now it’s working and I’m trying to remember how to run Ubuntu.
I would love to know if a Raspberry Pi DSI cable works. Where can I find out what type of cable the DevTerm uses for it’s screen?
EDIT: After looking at the cable and confirming with the main board schematics, I see the DevTerm does not use the 15-pin DSI/CSI cable like what the Raspberry Pi uses. I still don’t know if there is a name for this cable or not. The schematics hint at a 48-pin cable, but I didn’t count the pins to verify myself. I wonder if variations of it can be purchased elsewhere.
