Calm down please. You do not have to use balena if it does not suit your needs. Feel free to extract the relevant code from the project and adapt it to work without balena – it’s open source and we encourage reuse and modifications.
@Richard238 as my colleague says above the project is free and open source so you’re free to take the code and run it using a method you’re more familiar with if that’s easier.
We’ve volunteered time testing and creating a separate version of the project specifically for you to help debug why your display isn’t working. Of course this is outside the regular use case for the project and requires some time investment on your side to try it since we can’t reproduce what you’re seeing. Our aim is to help you figure out what’s going wrong.
Docker isn’t necessary to use all parts of the CLI, nor is it necessary for what we’re testing here. Once you have the CLI installed, then you can go ahead and extract the .zip file and execute the CLI commands from within the same folder as the Dockerfile for the project after extracting. The command you’ll need is balena push <appName> where <appName> matches the name of your app within the balenaCloud dashboard. Note you’ll need to run balena login first to authenticate - I recommend the web method for your use case here, and there’s further information on that here.
It should also be possible for you to click on this link which will deploy the branch with the changes in the same way as you deployed the original. Props to @rahul-thakoor for pointing this out.
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Ok, so far I’m at
20.10.20 14:02:45 (+0100) Downloading delta for image 'registry2.balena-cloud.com/v2/9bde266577ea7dbefe69385dfb0148db@sha256:e355eb9aa941a71244c540597ecb70c0a8e9616451e1d50abb9d55cab83a489b'
36% done.
20.10.20 14:12:15 (+0100) main INFO:root:Display type: InkyPHAT
20.10.20 14:12:22 (+0100) main INFO:root:Display dimensions: W 212 x H 104
20.10.20 14:12:22 (+0100) main INFO:root:Message: Hello World!
20.10.20 14:12:22 (+0100) main INFO:root:Font size: 23
20.10.20 14:12:23 (+0100) main INFO:root:Done drawing
Inky = no change though. 
@Richard238 now that you’ve pushed this branch can you enable support access and share your device UUID again please?
Having looked at the source for the inky library, it appears as though Pimoroni have released a new hardware revision (as I suspected in my post above).
I have attempted to add support for the new revision but obviously can’t test it to be 100% sure it works. It should also be possible to auto detect it. I have pushed the change to the same branch, but yeah if you can share your device I’ll take a look to confirm.
We’ve added support for the new InkyPHAT hardware in v1.1.0 of the Inkyshot project. Anyone having similar issues should be able to update and hopefully find the display works after this.
You’ll be able to tell if you have the new hardware (and the updated software) as the logs will show INFO:root:Display type: InkyPHAT_SSD1608 instead of INFO:root:Display type: InkyPHAT on the older ones.
SSD1608 
It’s working, but…! The text is tiny.
This is on three lines but needs a microscope to see it:
22.10.20 09:05:22 (+0100) main INFO:root:Message: I bet a funny thing about driving a car off a cliff is, while you're in midair, you still hit those brakes Hey, better try the emergency brake
Tried with FONT = Roboto FONT_SIZE = 27 , and a few other combinations, but no difference.
If they’re too big, the ends are chopped off each side of the display.
Are the display dimensions correct? INFO:root:Display dimensions: W 250 x H 122
Added research: (I don’t know if this is help nor hindrance)
Pimoroni gitub inky says:
Inky pHAT is a 212x104 pixel e-paper display
learn dot pimoroni dot com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-inky-phat says:
[images..] They should be PNG-8 images, 212x104 pixels
Thank you.
@Richard238 the font size is automatically dropped to 8 and the font changed to the pixel font when the code calculates that the message will not fit on the screen in a font size above 17. Please see the docs here for more information: https://github.com/balenalabs/inkyshot#test-character
Apparently the newer hardware is a higher resolution and so your display has dimensions of 250x122, the older InkyPHATs like I have here are 212x104. These dimensions are provided by the inky library: https://github.com/pimoroni/inky/blob/master/library/inky/phat.py#L18
OK, so the dimensions are correct. 
I’ve tried the test character too, but still it chops off the edges. Or leaves the messages too tiny to read.
One which did appear to work well, was the default ‘Today’s message has gone walkies’.
What font and size it that one, and how can I generate it here again?
Thank you.
@Richard238 that message is shown at size 25, see here: https://github.com/balenalabs/inkyshot/blob/master/update-display.py#L298
As I said though, if the calculation determines that the message will not fit on the display, it drops the size and changes to the pixel font. It does this at size 17 as below that the more complex fonts do not render well and are hard to read.
Seems there’s a lot of wasted space above and below the message.
Can the message not be split into more lines at a bigger, more readable font size?
Thank you.
@Richard238 maybe, but that would involve development work on the project - you’re welcome to try that and submit a PR but otherwise it’s not a priority for me (as one of the project maintainers) at the moment.
I’m not that familiar with Github. Looking at PR., none of the branches available seem to match my request.
Richard, Chris was referring to creating a pull request on GitHub. Its a way to make changes to the source code, and then propose them back to the repository for them to be accepted - https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/creating-a-pull-request
Yeah, I figured that!
Go to https://github.com/balenalabs/inkyshot, click pull requests, click new pull request.
Select base: master drop down - none of the branches shown seem to fit the area of concern for my request. 
Hey Richard, someone will have to create that branch with the code changes, and if you are not comfortable with it, our best bet is for someone to find the same feature request useful for them and wait for them to do it.
No, I’m not at all familiar with github. (That name, ‘Git’? Charming. What were they thinking?!)
But that could take weeks, months years. It may never happen.
Thanks any way.
Richard.
My UPDATE_HOUR is set to 10, but today I got the ‘Sorry folks…’ message.
Just logged in (13:50), changed UPDATE_HOUR to 14, and the quote changed to straight away.
Does the dashboard need to be running for the quote to change?
Thank you.