Connecting to qwiic device requires reading from device with smbus2

[nicholsn]

I'm using the qwiic alphanumeric library to connect to this display from a jetson nano using pHAT and running into an issue where the device doesn't get detected. For example, no device is detected when I run

import qwiic_alphanumeric
my_display = qwiic_alphanumeric.QwiicAlphanumeric()
mydisplay.begin()

However, if I run the following then the devices gets detected and works as expected.

import qwiic_alphanumeric
import smbus2

bus = smbus2.SMBus(1)
bus.read_byte(0x70)

my_display = qwiic_alphanumeric.QwiicAlphanumeric()
my_display.begin()
my_display.print("hi")

I'm new to the qwiic ecosystem and I'd greatly appreciate if someone has insight about why I would need to bus.read_byte(0x70) off the device so it can initialize.

Thank you!

[santaimpersonator]

For technical assistance, users should post questions on our forum.

With that said, have you installed the overarching qwiic Python package (in addition to the qwiic_alphanumaric Python package)? Otherwise, have you at least installed the qwiic_i2c Python package, which provides the I2C driver used to communicate with our Qwiic devices?

[sfe-SparkFro]

Closing due to inactivity. Please re-open if you come back to this, thank you!