Pitop [4] nothing on OLED

pi-top [4]
#1

recieved my pitop yesterday installed and flashed it as instuctions show with the latist firmware
only time i ever see anything on the OLED screen is when it boots or shuts down it shows the [4]
and if i plug in the power i see the battery if the pi is off

the pt-miniscreen service shows as working
running command liner sows nothing on the screen
buttons donet show anything when pressed(had to plug in a hdmi caable to setup the wifi)

contated support but nothing back yet

#2

following on from this i managed to get it working and thought i would report back to help any one else
so to get it working i did the following

after watching the log files i noticed the command (to open the log run “journalctl -n 100”

Pi-top oled display “hi”
was activating and retruning the following in log files

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image1185×137 110 KB

i noted the SPI was running on 1

  1. i ran sudo raspi-config
    in here under interfaces i enables the SPI and I2c
  2. then rebooted

3.then flipped the SPI Interface from 1 - 0 using the following command “pi-top oled spi 0”

  1. then restarted the OLED mini screen service using the following command
    “sudo systemctl stop pt-miniscreen.service”
    and
    “sudo systemctl start pt-miniscreen.service”

the screen then started up and worked as expected

only thing i can colude is the pi-top hardware and the Pi-OS are expecting different SPI’s and forcing the SPI number in teh OS resolves the issue

hope this helps others

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#3

problem is a little more complex after a reboot the SPI port is not sticky it reverts back to 1 now trying to work out where that is initialy set no luck so far

#4

work around is to run a pi startup script to change the spi on boot then restart the services

to do this i used /etc/rc.local to excicure the commands
first of all i needed to make the rc.local exicutable
sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local
then modifying the rc.local with

#!/bin/sh -e
touch /tmp/rc_local_ran_start.txt
echo "--- $(date) - rc.local script started ---" > /tmp/rc_local_debug.log
systemctl stop pt-miniscreen.service >> /tmp/rc_local_debug.log 2>&1
sleep 1
pi-top oled spi 0 >> /tmp/rc_local_debug.log 2>&1
sleep 1
systemctl start pt-miniscreen.service >> /tmp/rc_local_debug.log 2>&1
# Log the end time
echo "--- $(date) - rc.local script finished ---" >> /tmp/rc_local_debug.log
touch /tmp/rc_local_ran_finish.txt
exit 0

when you reboot the pi the OLED screen should start
its not a perfect solution but its made a none functioning pi-top work for me hope it helps some one else

1 Like