Four defects found by hardware testing of the Expansion Kit V2.
Touch never registered. The panel's controller does not use the point-count
encoding the reference CHSC6X drivers document: byte 0 reads 0x00 idle and
0x1F while a finger is down, so testing for a count of 1 never fired. A
partly-failed read leaves 0xFF, which must not count as a press either, so
the test is now != 0x00 && != 0xFF.
Touch polling could stall the UI loop for ~1 s at a time. The controller
NACKs its address whenever it has nothing to report, and calling requestFrom()
unconditionally logged a bus error on every 50 ms poll and, once the bus
wedged, burned a full ESP_ERR_TIMEOUT inside loop(). Probe the address first,
which reports the same NACK quietly, and bound the read with setTimeOut().
The display could not be woken once it blanked; only RST brought it back.
turnOn() re-ran the whole display.init(), which re-enters SPI setup, spends
~500 ms in Adafruit's reset delays and pulses GPIO 21 - the line shared with
TP_RST, so it reset the touch controller on every wake. Since turnOff() no
longer parks that line low, the panel stays configured while dark and waking
is just the backlight. Toggling also clears the refresh deadline so the
current frame is drawn immediately instead of the stale one.
Power-off rebooted instead of staying off. powerOff() went through
enterDeepSleep(), which always arms an ext1 wake on P_LORA_DIO_1; a deep-sleep
wake is a full reboot, so a node in live traffic restarted within seconds of
showing "Turning OFF". It now disables every wake source, so the node stays
down until RST or a power cycle.
Note that the display off/on cycle had never been exercised on this board
before: observer builds pinned AUTO_OFF_MILLIS=0, so the panel never blanked
until display.timeout made it a runtime setting.
Replace the sparse Heltec V4 R8 observer home screen with a padded dark
analytics dashboard, add manual display control, and make blanking a runtime
setting.
Dashboard (DISPLAY_ACTIVITY_DASHBOARD, the four R8 TFT observer envs):
- RadioActivityWindow: 20 one-minute buckets of valid RX packets, no heap.
The caller's 32-bit millis() is extended to a monotonic 64-bit clock, so
nothing downstream has a rollover case; an always-on node passes 2^32 ms
after ~49.7 days, which would otherwise re-enter warm-up and divide 20
minutes of traffic by seconds. Rates use 19 whole minutes plus the elapsed
part of the current one rather than a fixed 1200 s.
- ObserverDashboard: header, radio strip, headline totals, a 20-bar
packets-per-minute graph and RF/status footers, with separate portrait and
landscape layouts. A text row is a fixed 16 px, which is 3.2 logical units
in portrait but 4.27 in landscape, so one shared grid would overlap.
Text is trimmed by character budget, not measured width: getTextWidth()
reports an over-long string at the portrait driver's fallback scale, so
DisplayDriver::drawTextEllipsized() under-trims and the row renders at half
height.
- Six per-row signatures computed from what is actually drawn, so only the
rows whose pixels changed repaint. No startFrame(), no whole-screen clear.
Link state moved out of the full-frame signature, so a DHCP renewal or WiFi
flap repaints one footer row instead of the panel.
- Dark theme by retuning the UIColor statics at runtime, which needs no
display-driver edit and carries boot, setup, reboot and power-off with it.
Touch and button (DISPLAY_TOUCH_TOGGLE):
- CHSC6X at I2C 0x2E, polled; TP_INT is unusable (optional R13, and GPIO 43
is U0TXD). The point-count byte is tested against a valid count, never
against non-zero: an idle read returns 0xFF, which reads as a finger held
down forever and latches the tap detector after one event.
- turnOff() no longer parks PIN_TFT_RST low on this board. GPIO 21 is a
shared LCD_RST/TP_RST net, so doing that held the touch controller in
reset for as long as the display was off. Verified against Heltec's
expansion-board and mainboard schematics and the V4-R8 datasheet pinout,
which also correct the pin comment in HeltecV4R8Board.cpp.
- The USER button click now toggles the display too; it previously did
nothing whenever the display was already on.
display.timeout:
- `set display.timeout <secs>` / `get display.timeout`, 0 = stay on, 60 s
default, 3600 max. Read live, so a change applies without a reboot and
restarts the countdown rather than firing on the old deadline.
- Stored in MQTTPrefs (/mqtt.json), keeping NodePrefs aligned with upstream.
Runtime-only: LegacyV1MQTTPrefs and the four frozen binary payload sizes
are unchanged. No JSON format-version bump - the loader skips keys no
def() claims, so older firmware reads newer files and this firmware reads
older ones with the default applied. Both directions are covered by tests.
- Joins the observer atomic-setter contract, so a failed save rolls the live
value back instead of only claiming to.
New periodic work uses a wrap-safe deadline check; `millis() >= deadline`
fires every loop for a whole interval before each rollover.
Adds test_radio_activity_window, test_observer_dashboard (driving the real
renderer against a recording DisplayDriver in both orientation profiles) and
test_touch_tap_detector. 440 native cases pass.
Adam Gessaman