Customer:
I’ve been experiencing a weird problem with the Inkplate 6PLUS. Sometimes the device just goes into an endless reboot loop and reboots without displaying any error message on the serial port.
I have 6 different Inkplate 6PLUS units and have tried them all. Sometimes a few have the problem, sometimes they don’t. I’ve also tried rolling back to earlier versions of my software, but that doesn’t help. So I’m confident the problem isn’t related to my software or any particular hardware I’m using.
I’m using Arduino IDE to compile and upload the code. I have a suspicion that the IDE could be the problem—maybe there’s an issue with the uploading that causes this error randomly.
The error mostly appears when the first display.display() call of the Inkplate Library gets executed.
Are you aware of any problem like this?
Originally submitted via email support on 16 October 2023. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
This is strange behavior. Often a problem like this is software-related, and it could be something in the drivers, but I haven’t heard of this specific behavior. If you’re using Arduino IDE legacy (1.8.x), that’s basically what we use, so the IDE is probably not the source. However, one thing you could try is clear all the cache in the IDE by deleting the Arduino15 folder in your AppData folder—but please make a backup first and do this at your own risk. You will have to re-install the board definitions.
Make sure to get the latest board definition and Inkplate library. We recently pushed an update to the main branch of the Inkplate library. Here’s the guide: Inkplate Get Started Page — Inkplate docs documentation
Some questions to help resolve this:
When the ESP32 reboots, it usually sends a message to the serial port with a debug message, especially if it’s a crash, power-on, or hardware reset. One of these three is what’s happening. The only way the ESP32 would not print a debug restart message is because of a software bug. If you can find a debug message on the serial port (it’s at 115200 baud!) after some attempts, please share what it says.
Also try uploading with Core Debug Level set to Verbose.
Are you connecting any peripheral devices to Inkplate that could be causing this reset? If so, let me know which devices and on which pins, as this is sometimes a source of problems like this.
Let me know what you find, and we can go from there. If nothing here helps, we’ll need to pinpoint specifically where the device restarts.
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