I bought a Waveshare RPI-HMI-7A DSI display in the hopes of using it for VenusOS v3.73 on an RPi. The display is a beautiful bit of highly ruggedized kit! I’m very impressed with the build quality, and it runs RPi Desktop wonderfully. But with Venus, I could never get anything but a black screen…
I spent several hours trying to get it to work via the following:
Overlay & Kernel Args: I attempted to fix the black screen by modifying /u-boot/config.txt and /u-boot/cmdline.txt with specific Waveshare panel overlays (vc4-kms-dsi-waveshare-panel) and explicit resolution/rotation parameters (video=DSI-1:720x1280M@60,rotate=90).
Driver Handshake Troubleshooting: I attempted to manually copy the working .dtbo overlay file from the functional Raspberry Pi Desktop setup into Venus OS to see if the kernel would recognize the DSI panel.
Bootloader Overrides: I tested various firmware-level overrides and “Fake KMS” (fkms) configurations in an attempt to force the Raspberry Pi’s GPU to handle the screen initialization before the Venus OS kernel took control.
Its seems the case my be that Venus uses a minimal, stripped-down Linux kernel that lacks the specific driver library required to complete the low-level hardware “handshake” with the Waveshare DSI bridge chip. It appears that part of the problem might be that the display is portrait native, and Venus needs landscape.
Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicions? Better yet, has anyone gotten this to work on this display, or something similar? I now have a different display that works, but it is not nearly as slick as the Waveshare device.
Thanks in advance!
Reagan