Off to a rough start

Published on 2025-01-15 in Sharp Gadget.

The first version of the PCB didn’t work, for the very simple reason that I inverted the display connector. I did obsess about its orientation a bit, changing it several times, and finally settled on the one that is wrong. Oh well. I immediately fixed the design, and also added a power switch that cuts off the battery connector, because it seems I’m more likely to use this with a battery.

I worked on other things while waiting for the new PCB, so it wasn’t really much of a waste of time.

With the connector in the right orientation, the display switched on with some random pattern of pixels on it. And that’s when I had a second surprise: the pixels are color. It was supposed to be a LS013B7DH03 display, but apparently I got LS013B7DH06 instead! Well, I can live with that. They use the same connector and the same protocol.

I proceeded to try to use that display with CircuitPython. Earlier, I noticed that it already has a sharpdisplay module, so I expected this to be just a question of using it with the right options. It doesn’t seem to be the case. There is precious little documentation, but it seems that it was written for some other sharp displays with a different protocol. Oh well, I will just have to write the driver myself.