Balena not working with PiTFT display

Product support
1

hi

thank you for reading. I am Anthony, and I am fairly new to Raspberry Pi and to BalenaCloud.

I followed the steps and got the unicorn when I tried to push balena to my raspberry pi, but all I get is a white screen and nothing else. It seems to also be working fine on the dashboard, so Im not sure why all I am getting is a white screen on my Pi. The display is a 3.5" display on a raspberry pi 3. I was able to get the display to show an image using another application, so I am not sure why I am not even able to get the balena logo on the device.

any help would be appreciated !
Anthony

3

Hey Anthony, are you following the getting started guide? I don’t think that takes into account setting up the display. I would recommend you have a look at https://www.balena.io/blog/make-a-web-frame-with-raspberry-pi-in-30-minutes/ and let us know if you run into any issues with that

5

yes I followed that to the letter and got everything right - I even saw the unicorn in the terminal window.

unfortunately, all i get is a white screen on the display. I dont even get the balena Dash logo on the screen.

6

Hey, did you apply all of the configuration variables correctly? Often this can be the issue with screens not working properly.

7

I followed the instructions to the letter. The only thing I changed was the
Define device GPU memory in megabytes.
[RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_gpu_mem] to 396.

the weird thing is that it was working fine before I tried this. Is there a way that I can uninstall Balena?

8

Uninstalling balenaOS from your device is as simple as reflashing your SD card with another OS. I would try the configuration values from this thread before that though, as the 3.5" tfts can behave slightly differently: 3.5" TFT with RaspberryPi