Interfacing (DSI, CSI, I2C, etc.) • 3rd Party DSI screen bringup... ILI9806e DSI transfer failed?

Hello! I bought a third party DSI screen and I'm trying to get it working with my raspberry pi. I'm trying to do the first hardware bring up and running into an error message sending DSI instructions to the panel. I'm wondering if anyone with lots more experience in screens and DSI protocol could point me in the right direction?

(Questions and error messages are listed first with more project information and context below that)

Question 1

I'm seeing two potential problems in dmesg:
The VCC and VCCIO signals to my LCD panel are connected directly to the 3.3V output of the Raspberry pi, so there's no regulator or way to cut power to the screen. I've read that the init sequence probably relies on being able to power down the screen before/after asserting the reset line. Could this be causing problems?

Question 2

Looks like the initial messaging to the DSI screen is failing with error code -110. I have no idea what this is or where to start looking... Anyone familiar with DSI messaging know what might be happening here?
Context and Information

Here is some context to my project:

• I bought a 3rd party screen that uses the ILI9806E display controller in MIPI DSI mode. The screen's datasheet can be found here. It's a 2 channel MIPI dsi 480x640 with capacitive touch screen.
• I made a custom pcb to route the DSI channels, clock, and I2C signals to the raspberry pi. Obviously there's tons of sources of error that can come from this. I can provide more detail if relevant.
• I am using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 on a Waveshare Compute Module IO board plus.
• I have Raspberry Pi OS installed. It is on Debian bullseye (11), kernel version 6.1.21-v8+...
• I based the ili9806e driver on this driver I found in another forum thread.
• DTS overlay file I used is here.

This is a complicated project with a lot of custom stuff I'm trying out, so apologies if everything is so inadequately explained. Let me know if more information would help and I can provide it.

Thanks!

Edit: Fixed ili9806e driver source link to use the right one (dsi) not the spi version.

Statistics: Posted by Cory Parsnipson — Fri Jan 30, 2026 6:11 am

---