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I didn't design these things, so all I know is that the datasheet says the lifetime will be reduced if you update it more than once every five minutes. A clock with a minutes display exceeds that by 5x.

(And indeed, the display I used did break! I have no idea why, but it just stopped updating one day.)

Ben explains some of the constants that can be tweaked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

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I can provide some context here - from my experimentation, after 10 partial updates the contrast is notably worse, but doing a full screen refresh resets things sufficiently that the screen looks sharp again.

To reduce degradations further, whenever UpNext boots it does a cycle of 10 full screen refreshes - overkill certainly, but I think of this as the “cleaning cycle.” If the screen ever starts to fade, I power cycle it, and it’s fine for a long time.

I’ve been running it continuously like this for 2 years now, and while the screen is a bit less sharp than it was originally, it’s still in good shape - the photos in the article are from this week.

Maybe it can be incorporated into the design: refresh as a kind of 5m warning before your next meeting. I’ve certainly enough meetings not to exhaust ten refreshes before the next head’s up flash...

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