I purchased an Inkplate 6FLICK (with enclosure and battery) and have been unable to get the display to work. I’ve worked through the troubleshooting steps and believe I’ve isolated the fault to the display subsystem.
Setup:
- Inkplate 6FLICK, purchased new, with enclosure and battery
- Soldered Inkplate Boards package 4.0.0
- Arduino IDE 2.3.10, macOS
- Panel VCOM reads -2.35V (from the factory screen)
Symptom:
The factory peripheral-mode screen displays correctly and has never changed. No uploaded sketch has ever altered the display.
What I’ve confirmed:
- Uploads complete successfully with all hashes verified
- Boot log reaches “entry 0x400805b4” — a complete, clean boot
- A bare sketch with only Serial.begin() and a println loop runs indefinitely with no resets
- Any sketch calling display.begin() causes an immediate boot loop — it never reaches the first Serial.println() in setup()
So the ESP32, flash, power and serial are all healthy. The board only crashes when code touches the display.
Already ruled out:
- Board selection (Soldered Inkplate 6FLICK)
- Port and CH340 (macOS, port enumerates correctly)
- USB-C cable (the original cable was corrupting flash writes; replaced, and uploads now verify cleanly)
- Flash integrity (Erase All Flash Before Sketch Upload enabled)
- Flash frequency (tried both 80MHz and 40MHz)
- Power (blue LED lit, battery connected, runs indefinitely on a non-display sketch)
I suspect the panel FPC connection or the display power management chip. Could anyone advise on next steps?
thanks!
