oled display breaks down, pixels are fading

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crito
 
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Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2014 1:14 pm

oled display breaks down, pixels are fading

Post by crito »

hi,

We use an adafruit lcd in one of our commercial products.
We have now about 40 in the field but this oled display keep giving us trouble.

Product used is:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/326
Monochrome 0.96" 128x64 OLED graphic display

After same months of use, some pixels start fading away. (see image)
We sandwich it between a transparent plastic on top (to protect it from human interaction) and squeeze it in from the back for mounting.
Adafruit mention its oled and doesn't use a backlight, also it are individual pixels not rows/columns so i guess not a connection (?)

When time passes, more and more pixels fade till in the end its completely black.

Is this burn in ? doesn’t look like it, in our case the pixels are fading, with burn in you expect the opposite.

Questions:
-what is it?
-what is causing this?
-is there a way to fix this?
-what can we do to prevent this?
-have others the same problem?
-anything we can measure/test/try at a returned product to detect the problem?
-Any tests we can do before we ship out a new product? (we test products here before they move out but even 2 days powered up it works fine till they come back broken)
-are there know issues with this display? (link/info?)

All help is very much appreciated,


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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: oled display breaks down, pixels are fading

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes.. they don't need a backlight because the pixels emit light.

All light-emitting devices are subject to decay over time, and OLEDs are no exception. If you run them continuously with the same pixels lit for long periods, they're subject to a burn-in effect similar to what happened on old CRT screens.

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crito
 
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Re: oled display breaks down, pixels are fading

Post by crito »

adafruit_support_mike wrote:OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes.. they don't need a backlight because the pixels emit light.

All light-emitting devices are subject to decay over time, and OLEDs are no exception. If you run them continuously with the same pixels lit for long periods, they're subject to a burn-in effect similar to what happened on old CRT screens.

sorry but this is 6 months, not 10 years...
also as far as i have seen, burn gives a different effect than what we see here.
eg. the word 'press' as in my image is displayed often, but as you can clearly see not all those pixels are fading, only some,which makes in the case of burnin no sense.
Something else is going on here...

gterrell26
 
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Re: oled display breaks down, pixels are fading

Post by gterrell26 »

I am using the SSD1306 in a commercial product as well and had concerns about burn-in/fading. Originally we implemented a memory copy approach, with a copy, clear sequence. This approach became cumbersome as we continually had to keep the 2 memory regions sync'd. Then using VSCode Intellisense, we noticed the "ssd1306_command" in the Adafruit_SSD1306 class. Much easier is as follows (oledDisplay is our code's display instance).

oledDisplay.ssd1306_command(0xAE); // "sleep" display
oledDisplay.ssd1306_command(0xAF); // "wake" display

We use a timer to blank the display, and wake it whenever the user presses the "C" button on the OLED FeatherWing.

Hope this helps,
Greg

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