Good evening, I recently purchased 2 of the Piicodev OLED screen. Absolutely fantastic screens for outputting data. In the last day or so I was getting some random pixels on the lower half of the screens when using piicodev adapter(w/rpi pico), but would be fine using the piicodev adapter on the rpi zero 2w. After checking the forum, one user suggested/confirmed that a solution is to update the ‘PiicoDev_Unified.py’ file. So I downloaded it again from the guide and fixed the problem (although I can’t see how unless Thonny had corrupted the transfer to the Pico Memory). I even used the piicodev breadboard adapter. The question is, during my fault finding of the circuit and software, is the ‘melted’ look on the bottom screen normal (as part of the manufacture). I was using both screens in a trial and error, and I’m now wondering if I’ve potentially damaged them? i.e Both screens show that melted look, I cant be sure if it was like that to start with.
It is possible that “melted” look that you’ve described occurred during manufacture, I was part of the team that assembled a decent amount of the stock that we current carry of the SSD1306 OLED PiicoDev modules.
The last step in the current manufacturing process of these boards (before testing and inspection under microscope) is soldering the flexible PCB of the OLED to the blue-tinted PCB of the module itself on the back, we have a robot that very quickly stamps a ~350 C flat-tipped soldering iron onto the back of the displays while the module sits inside a custom housing.
We used to hand solder these OLEDs, which often leads to a neater looking product, although particularly at the start of a manufacturing run before the settings have been dialled in for temperature, heat-time, and even solder pasting, the rate of defects tends to be a fair bit higher.
There shouldn’t be damage or defects on any boards that passed testing and went into stock, although of course there’s no way to be completely certain, even with every board tested and inspected individually. If you feel it is defective or damaged, please let us know by replying to your order confirmation email and we’ll look into it further and follow up from there.
To be fair, for that melted looking spot, if it was related to recent operation, I don’t think the screen would operational anymore and there hasn’t been a hint of heat. As I’m getting back into programming and electronics, it’s fair to say that some losses will occur through experimentation.
