anyone ever had a touchscreen that stopped 'touching' ?

Switched saffy on today and the touchscreen no longer 'touches'.
Display is fine and if i change the temp via simplify3d control panel - it shows up on the screen.

So it's just the touch aspect.

If you press down really hard and move around, occasionally it will trigger.
But not often and not consistently - so it's definitely buggered.

yes i have reflashed the firmware - no difference.

In short BUM !

So while i try to track down a new screen - and it's an odd non-standard with a ribbon cable and very little onboard processing. basically, unlike most touchscreens, it's just a a screen.

I suspect I'll probably have to buy a screen+board pairing.

Which will throw up further problems as all i can find are robin nano v2 and i want a 1.2 for direct swap.

Sigh, Right off to see what i can buy.

***

TOP TIP !

If you decid to remove the ribbon cable from the board and then reinsert to see if that works, and it's always worht a shot.
Don't drop the bloody teeny tiny metal clip that holds the ribbon in place.

Like all teeny and absolutely essential bits of metal, as soon as it hits the floor it will instantly dimension jump to another universe and vanish completely from this one.

And without it the ribbon contacts cannot be pressed against the socket contacts.

Oh Joy.

And it appears to be non-magnetic as scouring the floor with both bright lights and magnets has so far turned up not one single bent bit of essential metal.

This is the first time i've ever had one of these clips come out of the bracket. They are normally held in place and only capable of sliding out enough to release the ribbon.
Not this bastard :-(

Also while I do have another 3.2inch touchscreen - it uses an exp cable and the robin nano does not have an exp socket.
Well, I meanm it wouldn;t would it ?

Robin nano 1.2 board and screen combo can be had from china for £80 odd and about 3 weeks transit time.

While i can get a v1.1 board and screen here tomorrow for about £50.
I can see no visible difference between my 1.2 and the 1.1
So that's most likely the way I'm going to go.
It should just be a straight pop and drop.
'should' lmao, of course it will..

It would appear impossible to buy the screens by themselves.

Right, I'm going back under the desk for one last look into the outer dimensions....

One big difference I see between the 1.1 and the 1.2 boards is the wifi header. The wifi header on the 1.2 seems to be the same header that comes on the Octopus and SKR 2 that supports the ESP-07S and ESP-12S. I have 2 extra ESP-12S boards. IF you get the 1.2 and PM me your address I will send you one of these and you can help me try to figure out wifi with Marlin.

well I made a new clip - 'cos you know I've got some 3d printers and it occurred to me - belatedly - that I could lol.
I've made much smaller items in the past.

So now I have a pure white screen.

I can't see how the ribbon cable could be held any more firmly or pressed tighter against the contacts.
So that's that.

I've got a 1.1 board and screen coming today.
The wifi module connector looks identical to the one I've currently got installed.
I have yet to load the clever firmware that lets you actually do something useful with the module.
But that would have been useful yesterday so I'll have to dig that up again and see what I can do with it.

In fact the board picture looks identical - so maybe some difference in the main chip - no idea.
The only visible difference I can find is that the picture on amazon says 1.1 and mine says 1.2.
Other than that I think it's socket for socket identical.
Thanks for the offer :-)

I did try uploading a file to the sdcard via the simplify3d control panel, abut all it did was try to print.
Some gcode mismatch apparently.
Plus it doesn't actually transfer the gcode file itself, which would only take a few minutes, it uploads it one command at a time.
Which is just totally impractical.

So just waiting for phoebe to tell me the amazon man is here :-)

And try and figure out why the latest update for flightsim 2020 does nothing but go round in circles and prevents the program from being used.
At times i really really hate microsoft...

On a positive note the system i built for my client last year to play flightsim on - is now worth more than it was when i built it lol
Talk about a weird situation in computers at the moment. The graphics card has doubled in price and you can pretty much write your own cheque for the processor.
Crazy world.


Obviously I'll try the new screen first before i start replacing the whole thing.

The clip header was a bastard to measure, but the clip I made looks good. The cable is locked in solid.
So who knows.

just refitted cable and it's now back to normal picture, but the touch is still buggered.
So with luck all I'll need to do is change the screen over.
So yay for me and my clip :-)

Not usually much chance of success, but check around the screen edges for bits of grit, loose plastic, etc that are registering as a “touch”. Most of those screens can only see one touch at a time, and if it thinks it’s already being touched, then it won’t register your finger poking.

well as it turns out - despite what it said on amazon, they sent me a v1.2
So that's good. Even if i don't have to change it today, it's always good to have a spare of something they don't make anymore :-)
Also explains why the pictures were the same, though why the one on amazon had 1.1 written on it, no clue.

Just beefing up my clip a little. Given i didn't have the original to work with, mine is surprisingly similiar to the original.
Just needs the bit that presses down on the cable being a little bit thicker.
so I've pushed that up by 0.25mm and we'll see how this one fares.

That wifi header that looks like an oversized stepper driver socket is what will accept the ESP-12S.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/xq90/923/unVR6o.jpg

well it's not the screen.

Both screens with both cables do exactly the same thing, so it's got to be the board that's causing the problem.
Bum.

Right walkj the dogs, and come back in here with coffee and chocolate to do the changeover.

@autowiz - yeah that's what the 1.2 uses.
Not sure which module i have but it fits the socket.

With all the BigTreeTech mainboards only the Octopus and the SKR 2 have that header. All others have the 8 pin header that only supports ESP-01S. You can see the tiny sorry little guy on my SKR Pro here..

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/xq90/923/qUz5lI.jpg

It absolutely sucks. I am hoping it will do better with the powerful mainboard driving it but I am keeping my hopes low. Now the ESP-12S I have big expectations of. I have 2 printers with ESP-01S and 2 printers with ESP-12S. This should make for a real good comparison. The ESP-12S module is notably larger and connects with many more pins..

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/xq90/923/PscoTF.jpg

What wifi do you have for that board? ESP-07S or ESP-12S?

it's a 12s.

And she lives !
Using the old screen - so it was the board.

Weirdly the new one did not come with firmware, so the white screen with greyish dots, gave me a bit of a fright to start with lol
Flashed medelis firmware on and - everything back to fully functional :-)

So at least I got a spare screen out of it - and you can't buy them by themselves.
And i did buy the part that was broken for a lot less than they are currently being sold from china.

So apart from the dead board - it's all good really :-)

I even appeared to have plugged everything in correctly.
I'm not daft (despite what you may have heard) I did one cable at a time and kept it all plugged in till moved.
:-)

Right now that's all done I can look forward to the tct show on wednesday.

Not sure what freebies there will be this year - but it's the the first actual walk around show for a couple of years, so with luck there'll be some stuff that 'falls' of the tables.

Be interesting to see what a post (kinda) covid tct looks like.

https://www.tct3sixty.com/event/en/page/home

You'd love it mate :-)

It's nowhere near as good as it was 5 or 6 years ago. Then allthe companies were new and you could talk to all the designers and company co's.

These days it's mostly print bureaus and resellers and very little for the desktop end of things.

But it's the best we;ve got - that I know of.
So I'll go chat to as many people as possible while my mate acquires as many pens and bags as he can lol
It's not really distraction burglary, if you are genuinely interested in the conversation lol

Man that looks like a great time waiting to happen. And have you ever used that ESP-12S before? If so what do you have to say about it?

I set up the esp 12s with the basic mks firmware.
So I know it works.

the aerial is not good enough to connect to my router, but the esp generates it's own wifi network - it's a clever little chip with a full router built in.

I could connect both the pc and my pocket computer (mine is used for that much much more than as a phone) to it's own network with no problem.

But that's almost all you can do with the stock firmware. It's pretty useless.
There is a custom firmware that apparently adds all the stuff you actually need.
ie: uploading a file via wifi to the sd card. And monitoring temps and starting and stopping prints.

The firmware setup process looked a bit fiddly, so I've yet to try it.
Plus i can't remember what it was called and will need to do a forum search - again lol

Plus all you do is drop the esp firmware on the sd card and it just hoovers it up on printer boot.
I do like that about these boards. No buggering around.

halfway through changeover:
Attachment 16852

esp chip
Attachment 16853

Ribbon cable clip
Attachment 16854

I should really have made it from pla - but alexa's got petg loaded and I couldn't be arsed to change it over.
Plus the petg is a bit more flexible, so more robust for this particular use.
Anyway it worked, and that's 99% of what counts :-)
When you're dealing with something 0.5mm thick, tough is often better than hard lol

If you're wondering about the little 'teeth' at the ends. I didn't leave a big enough gap between the arms and the ribbon press - so had to clip a bit off each side with the side clippers.

esp3d !
that's what the firmware is called.
https://github.com/luc-github/ESP3D

I really really really hate github.

Just no logic at all in the way the files are stored and retrieved.

It's like the programmers from facebook had a baby with the microsoft file security people and it was raised by lobsters and then wrote the github file system, with its eyes closed.

Just makes no sense to actual human people.

As far as i can tell, all the github does is give you the uncompiled files.
I just want the finished bin file, is that too much to ask ? lol