Super excited to have received this early Christmas present yesterday!
I left a white text program running for a few hours today though and am getting some image retention. Planning to leave it off overnight and maybe run full white for a few hours tomorrow. Has anyone seen this before?
Unrelated, I’ve noticed there’s a some horizontal banding in the screen. Is this normal or do I have some display damage / connector problems? Looked like this from The beginning. (See yellow and white bars in file manager pic.)
Loving all the great work that’s been done on various firmware and code projects, so much fun already !
I personally haven’t seen this before, but if this is causing more issues to you, I recommend emailing alex@clockworkpi.com and you might get a free replacement under warranty.
Thanks I think I’ll do that. It kinda appears as if it’s an “interlaced” display. Interesting effect but not seeing that on other pico photos I’ve seen around the web.
The screen burn-in is definitely a thing that happens. Since the uf2loader has never worked to expose the SD card as a USB drive under Windows (for me, at least), I’ve used TurboDeck to transfer files (a lot), and unfortunately it has that unnecessary (and static) splash screen. It got burned into mine when I left it on between transfers for a long time. The burn-in eventually went away though. Ever since I first noticed it, I’ve always used the ALT-comma keyboard combo to turn the display off if I’m going to leave the PicoCalc running for a while unattended. It probbaly saves some battery too, but the battery life with two 18650’s installed is so ridiculously long I’d have never bothered to turn the screen off just to save power.
I haven’t been bothered much by the shadow/banding. But I don’t often notice screen tear on other devices which seems to annoy others.
I’m guessing both problems are due to the cheap screens used by the PicoCalc. But there’s a chance it might be due to improper software drivers. No one really knows the “correct” way to access the screen, since it’s never been properly identified and there were a couple of discussion threads on the forum that basically proved it wasn’t the screen model the offical Clockwork repo claimed it to be. So different fiirmwares may be initializing and driving the screen differently. Some use the example from Clockwork. Some have done their own thing, trying to experiment and optimize for speed, etc. PicoMite uses whatever Peter threw into his code that happened to work for the PicoCalc and seemed faster than the initial port. Hopefully none of the software solutions are actively harming the screen, but there’s no way to really know unless people start reporting the same issues and it gets tied back to a specific firmware or set of firmwares.
Also, maybe worth noting, my PicoCalc was shipped in the second batch that went out, and the screen I’ve been using was a replacement from Clockwork (after the first broke with reassembly) arrived a month later. So my screen has seen 7-ish months of use.
Alex mentioned at some point they might start shipping different screen hardware to help prevent more broken screens, but I’m not sure that ever happened.
I had the same experience.
After running my self-made clock program for a long time, the screen burned in.
(I never figured out the cause, so I ended up stopping the clock display altogether.)
Interestingly enough, I can leave my PicoCalc running zeptoforth with the same image on the screen for long periods of time (read: days) without a problem at all. My guess then is that this has to do with the particular display drivers in use.
yeah, the initialization of the screen can control driving voltages, and some firmwares are definitely over volting it, that can cause the streaks some people see and cause a burn-in effect
Thankfully my case of burn in effect has gone away by itself overnight!
The streaky lines definitely seem to come and go though, without any particular link to what firmware is running. UF2 loader sometimes is usually streaky but I’ve seen it a few times without an issue.
Interesting about the zeptoforth image. I’ll have to do some reading about different drivers in use!
