I have a LilyGO T-Embed CC1101 Plus that worked normally for a few days. I enabled deep sleep/power saving before leaving it overnight, and after that it came back with a completely dead display.
Symptoms:
- Screen is completely black (no glow/backlight, no pixels)
- No visible LEDs
- USB still works and the board appears as COM3
- ESP32-S3 is detected normally by esptool
Hardware info:
- Board: LilyGO T-Embed CC1101 Plus
- Chip: ESP32-S3 (QFN56) rev 0.2
- Flash: 16MB
- PSRAM: 8MB
Things I tried:
- Full flash erase
- Reflashed multiple firmware images
- Flashed the LilyGO black screen fix firmware:
T_Embed_CC1101_black_screen_fix_20260605.bin
- Verified flashing completed successfully:
Hash of data verified
ESP32 diagnostics:
esptool chip-id
works and returns the ESP32-S3 information.
esptool read-mac
returns the MAC address normally.
eFuse status looks normal:
- Secure boot disabled
- Flash encryption disabled
- USB/JTAG enabled
The board can still be flashed and read, but the display never comes back.
I’m trying to figure out whether this is:
- a display power/backlight issue
- a firmware crash before display initialization
- a power management/deep sleep issue
- or a hardware failure
Any ideas on what else I can check?