Any suggestions for adding Bluetooth hardware to the Reform? I have the original motherboard and wifi card, just upgraded to the RK3588. Should I just get a USB dongle? Replace the old wifi card with a combo M2 card of some sort?
One challenge I encountered with the RK3588 is that I have an Intel combo card, but unfortunately the Bluetooth portion of the card uses USB over the M.2 connector. The mPCIe slot does not have USB on it, and the adapter I got does not have a USB chip onboard since it’s fully passive, so Bluetooth does not work.
I found this adapter, which definitely has USB on it. Alternatively, there are a couple of modern mPCIe cards with Intel Wifi/Bluetooth out there that don’t need adapters for Reform. I might buy the mPCIe option and report back.
I was trying to do the same thing, but lack of USB explains why I’m having issues. I bought a few adapters and an intel be200 and wifi works great but sadly no bluetooth. I guess I’ll pop that in the framework for now and put the ax210 card from that in the reform.
Does the pocket reform have the same lack of usb on its m2 slot?
edit: I’ve also tried a mpcie ax210 card and it seems bluetooth must be usb based on that as well. The wifi shows up with lspci but not bluetooth. The m.2 ax210 card on the framework bluetooth shows up under lsusb.
I’ll give that active adapter a go and report back.
Guess I’ve got some amazon returns to make.
edit edit: It does look like the pocket has usb on the m.2 slot pins 7 and 9.
Yep can confirm. I got the Aliexpress mPCIe Intel AX210 card and the wifi works great but no bluetooth. @hardcoreufo Let me know how that active M.2 adapter works!
1 Like
Sadly that mpcie adapter didn’t work either. I’m not convinced they sent me the right product though as the images on amazon show an IC on the back of the adapter and mine was completely passive.
I think I’m going to take one of the cheap mpcie adapters and solder some wires from the USB data pins (36 D- and 38 D+) to the motherboard USB. One of the connectors for the keyboard or trackball should work fine. I’ll report back.
1 Like
Yep, same experience with the Aliexpress mPCIe Intel AX210 (at least it was cheap). I think for now I’ll just go with something like Edimax BT-8500
update: Got the Edimax BT-8500 working but it did require installing ‘firmware-realtek’ from non-free
1 Like
I found an easy solution for the pocket reform with rk3588. So far it seems just as good as the asiarf module just with BT as well.
edit: NVM booted once and I could connect a logi mouse to it. Tried a bt speaker but couldn’t get it to connect, then tried a controller and also couldn’t get it to connect. Rebooted and my pocket reform just hung during boot. Popped the asiarf card back in and it booted normally. Tried alfa card again and it hung during boot but flipping the standby switch off and on it eventually booted. Card no long shows up under lsusb but does have a status light lit up on it. Not sure if it got fried and I have no other HW to test it on.
3 Likes
Got an Edimax BT-8500 and it worked right away, no drivers required for me but I might have slightly different sources. Showed up in gnome settings, up in the top bar, everything. So far I tried a bluetooth trackball and some headphones and they’re all cooperating well.
3 Likes
Yeah I was trying to install an usb dongle and a logi dongle on an internal usb hub in the reform 2.0 and shorted something despite my best effort to tape up my creation. So far I found fuse 2 blown and U12 gets very hot. Story for another day and another post.
Ok good news/bad news on the alfa wifi/bt card for the pocket. The card is mediatek mt7921 based and there was a regression with the 6.11 kernel. I was on 6.10 when bluetooth worked and updating to 6.11 broke it. Its broken so bad that I can only manage to boot the pocket after turning the standby switch off and on. Otherwise its just constant errors. Switching to asiarf wifi card boots no problem.
The good news is blacklisting the btusb kernel module allows booting the alfa card without issue and the wifi 6e is much faster than the asiarf card.
Might be able patch BT for now but it seems like a work around rather than a fix. I’ll definitely be testing it out on an sd card and not my nvme drive.
1 Like
More good news. While I haven’t figured out how to apply a kernel patch, I did find a work around to get bluetooth working on the alfa card. After blacklisting btusb all you have to do is modprobe btusb after boot and bluetooth works. I haven’t encountered any issues with this so far!
1 Like
So I just tried booting with RK3588 + AWM27921U wifi+bt card, and I’m seeing the mt driver crash at start with a kernel trace. Any trick to persuading this to work?
Yeah make a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add the line blacklist btusb. That should allow you to boot normally with wifi working but not bluetooth. Check the output of lsmod | grep btusb and nothing should show up. Then it should be as easy as sudo modprobe btusb. After that bt should start up and can be verified with lsmod | grep btusb again and you should see btmtk, btusb and bluetooth in the output. I’ve been trying to get that working automatically at login but so far it has not.
2 Likes
Anybody on a Pocket moving to a RK3588 and have a bluetooth solution as well?
Oops screwed up and posted this a few times trying to reply correctly. I think the old posts are deleted. Please remove if redundant.
Yes, the alfa AWM27921U is for the pocket, not the classic. It works as USB for both wifi and bt so it wont work at all with the classic as there are no usb lines to the mpcie slot.
1 Like
I keep testing out removing the btmtk kernel module I added to a blacklist and it seems that with the 6.12.9 kernel that we no longer need to blacklist it to get the alfa AWM27921U to work. I’ve rebooted a few times now and not had any problems, and bluetooth works at boot.
1 Like
Somehow I only now saw the posts about this card here, but it seems to be sold out at the only store I could quickly find online (rokland?). Any other sources?
Rokland is where I got it. There is also this which should also work, just a different form factor. Would need an extender to mount.
1 Like