New build V5.1 - screen and keys remain dark [SOLVED!]

Just yesterday I received the kit in good order. Last night assembled the unit, but upon boot the screen and the keys remain dark. Pi showed a couple of reboots after booting from a fresh SD-image and stabiliizes with a green LED on all the time, except for an occasional short blink.

During assembling I encountered difficulties with the orientation of the display cable. First I had it inserted the wrong way round on the pi, that is: the terminals towards the clamp of the connector. I did boot up when this error was there. I corrected the error, but to no avail.
(note: non of the pictures from the display cable inserted in the PI show the text that is on the cable. That would have been helpful! Also a generic hint (that I may have missed) about how to orient these type of flat flexible PCB’s would help.)

LD1 and LD2 do light up on the main board.

Where do I check if the display and the keyboard panel get power?

How do I progress from here?

Hi,
First I would start with the ribbon cable attached to the usb C port and make sure that’s connected properly. Without attaching the top panel just bottom panel (main board) alone and raspberry pi inserted on the main board as described in the wiki. From there if you have a mini hdmi to hdmi cable I would check from an hdmi screen and make sure zynthian powers on and shows a display correctly. Once that’s confirmed I would then attached the top.
So pretty followings the steps in the wiki and stopping at step 3.9 just to verify with an external display. With the included power supply plugged in after of course.
https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Assembling_Zynthian_Kit_V5

Thanks Hans. Your help is greatly appreciated!

I made some progress. Without the controlboard connected, the pi booted without an error into a menu that allows me to add chains. Then I proceeded with connecting the control board (not the display). After powering up again I got a Zynthian Error screen on the external monitor, with IP: Software at the top.

Another image gave me a differemt error message: IP: Audio/MIDI

Currently burning two new images.
Note that I already have programmed a new stock bootloader through the Raspberry Pi Imager, set to SD card boot.

EDIT 15:04: More progress, the screen sprung to life after reattaching the cable.

EDIT 15:21: even more progress: the whole unit now boots up and the control surface and the display are working. This is after I reseated the control and display flat cables. They seem very fiddly (just like the wiki and build instructions state).

EDIT 20:15: everything running smoothly! Now I need to get a grasp of the interface, how to operate the step sequencer and how to navigate between the different engines

For now I think this is a great piece of gear!

2 Likes

Ok good glad I could help.
You should not have to burn different images. Make sure you extracted the file before burning.
Also the V5 should be pre-configured already, after burning the image and turning the V5 kit, you should not have to do anything.