So it looks to me that the Vanessa design board won’t work with the new displays from Pervasive Displays. There are no stock of the old designs available on DigiKey so I bought the model that replaced it. I’m not that electronics savy but it looks to me from the pin out documents that the new board requires pin 8 on the ZIF connector to be high to power on the display. The old design didn’t have anything for that pin. And in the reference design, pin 8 is terminated. I can confirm by looking at the PCB that the trace just ends.
Now my question. Did I waste $50 for the board and $25 for the display that don’t work together? Can this be fixed? Can I just scratch into the trace on pin 8 and use wire to directly connect to a pin on the imp? Again I’m real green with electronics so I’m not sure I could do it properly but I figured I’d ask because I really want to build this.
I will try that, thanks. On another note. Does anyone have a sample image already in WIF format? I tried to google but no luck. I created one using a python script but if I had one I knew worked, then I know that’s one less thing that could be wrong in my setup.
So I’m just not that good at reading schematics. The new generation of the display does work with the Vanessa board. It’s not 100% software compatible and will require modified code to display properly though. Thanks to Joel for helping me with this.
I have the new display from Pervasive and am having issues with pixel bleeding. All the other pictures I’ve seen of the Vanessa have great contrast. I am using the Vanessa Epaper2 code. Is this a hardware problem?
This picture is of some text, a 1 pixel checkerboard on the lower left, and a 2 pixel checkerboard on the right.
The Epaper 2 code on Github is for a slightly modified file format that was used with the NewRelic FutureStack14 badge, which is why it isn’t quite right if you use the WIF format from Wyolum.
