I said that for initial testing purposes the addon should be completely disabled.
If you disable the addon and reboot the box, do you see the clock correctly? The time is displayed in the correct orientation and the digits are in the correct order?
Yes, the clock is display correctly (correct orientation and digits, but no indicators) when the plugin is disabled. After I enabled the plug-in, the clock is still displaying correctly and I can control the on/off display and the brightness, but the “colon always on” has no effect. All the indicators are turned on in the plug-in, but they are not showing up in the actual display.
I ran the test mode command with the plugin disabled, and the cycling display is all garbled.
Ok, you can ignore the test command for now.
Go back to the addon, enable advanced settings and set the following options:
Display type - 0
Controller type - 0
Common anode - On
Index 0 - try 0, 1, 2, 7 - one of these should work in getting the icons to light up.
Index 1 - 3
Index 2 - 4
Index 3 - 5
Index 4 - 6
The click OK.
Fyi, turning on “Common Anode” unscrambled the display. I tried all the values (0-6, no 7) for index 0, but none of them had any effect. So I’m still just getting the time display with no other indicators. If this is too much trouble, I can just live with what I’ve got. You’ve already helped me more than enough. Thank you!!
No trouble, icons should work, at the very least the colon.
Try to run /usr/sbin/OpenVFDService -t -dt 0x00010000 &
See if after it cycles through all the chars, it will light up each digit fully (will show ‘8’), try to determine the order of the digits and the symbols (all symbols should light up together, like in the video I posted above)
I disabled the addon; rebooted; ran the following cmds:
kill $(ps aux | grep '[O]penVFDService' | awk '{print $1}')
/usr/sbin/OpenVFDService -t -dt 0x00010000 &
The display looped through all the characters (all displayed correctly) just like your video. Unlike your video, none of the indicators showed during my loop. Maybe the vfd driver is just not compatible with my box in regards to the indicators …
Try it with these two commands instead, and see if there’s any difference in how it works.
/usr/sbin/OpenVFDService -t -dt 0x00010001 &
/usr/sbin/OpenVFDService -t -dt 0x00010002 &
With 0x00010001, the characters are both reversed and upside down, still no indicators.
With 0x00010002, I see no difference from 0x00010000, again no indicators.
Incidentally, I tried 0x00010007, some (not all) indicators showed up but all the characters are scrambled.
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Interesting. Try 0x00000007
Sorry, I should’ve said I tried 0x01000007 (not 0x00010007).
0x00000007 gave same behavior as 0x00000007, ie indicators show but garbled characters
In that case try 0x01010007
After 0x:
- controller type, can be 00 - 02
- common anode 00 or 01 - your display is common anode, so should be 01
- N/A, should be 00
- display type, can be 00 - 08
I’ve played around with some combinations. The pattern I see is that I need to set common anode to 01 in order to get unscrambled characters. But unfortunately, this turns off the indicators. The indicators only show when common anode is set to 00.
That’s good info. I’ll have to play around with the code. I suspect that I see a potential problem.
Can you please run it with common anode set to 00 and take a short video of the part when it cycles through the digits and sections? Like at ~00:50 in the video I posted. It could give me a pointer where to look for the problem.
Attached is gdrive link to the video for the whole loop sequence. Since the characters are scrambled, I couldn’t tell when to start recording … 
Btw, I ran it with 0x00000001
Thanks. Try the following driver:
openvfd.zip (65.0 KB)
Extract it to your box (say in Downloads). SSH in, go to where you extracted the zip and run
sh test_led.sh -t -dt 0x00010000
It is working!!! All indicators are showing, and all characters are displayed correctly. How/where should I install this new driver?
Awesome! Glad I was finally able to figure out what was wrong
Keep an eye on nightly builds, I’ll make some more adjustments (more geared towards other boxes with a similar problem) and update the driver in our builds.
Sure thing. Thanks again for all your help!
I pushed the changes, and this fix should be available in the next nightly (should be ready in a few hours).
Please test it and let me know if it works correctly or not.