I’m seeing some reliability issues with my Pocket Reform and I thought I’d start here and see if anyone has any ideas. I don’t really know where to start.
Although the little keyboard OSD seems to work just great, my Pocket Reform doesn’t always power on—the screen just remains blank. To solve this, I use the OSD to power off, and then power on again after a moment or two. This happens perhaps one-in-five times.
Fairly regularly, when I power my device on, key presses don’t seem to be being registered on the Pocket Reform itself—keyboard lights up, the OSD turns on and is responsive, the device starts booting, but won’t accept keyboard input at the disk unlock prompt.
When booted, I’ve also had the keyboard and mouse just stop talking to the Pocket Reform, even though the OSD has been responsive. That’s happened a handful of times and has unfortunately led to me needing to power cycle the device which my disk really doesn’t like.
The device has gone into a boot loop a few times with a flickering screen.
I’ve also noticed that the battery percentage levels seem pretty wonky—won’t charge past a certain percentage, etc—but I’ve seen discussions of that elsewhere here so I’m going to guess it’s not related.
I absolutely adore this little device and would really appreciate any suggestions!
Just fyi, I experience this one (although somewhat less often than you) but I have never experienced any of the others. I think there must be some hardware quirk in your device.
The only thing I can suggest would be examining the cables between the system controller and the motherboard and ensuring that they’re fully plugged in, and checking / upgrading the system controller firmware to rule out any firmware bugs. Details for both of these are in the “hardware” section of the manual.
Otherwise I’d reach out to the MNT customer support email address!
I frequently will have input issues on boot and have to reboot. I find it usually happens (maybe always?) after a reset rather than a power cycle. I never have the issue from a cold boot.
sometimes on the rk3588 module it will just power off and the screen will fade out. Freaked me out the first time because it seemed like something shorted but it was fine after. Sometimes it is just off and other times reboots to the disk encryption prompt.
I think its a Gnome issue but sometimes closing programs locks up the machine(rk3588 also happens on big reform with rk3588). I had no such issues with wayfire. Had no issues with gnome locking up on a311d.
Try reseting the keyboard via the oled instead of power cycling the Pocket. I was able to get the keyboard working again after this. It is much faster.
Interesting. I am running GNOME, so maybe that’s part of the issue I’m seeing. I’m currently on the i.MX8MP though, so I’d presume it differs from your experiences with the rk3588. I’ve got one of those on order so maybe I’ve more fun and games in store.
Sounds like perhaps there are few different issues at play here—perhaps a keyboard controller firmware issue or loose cable, and then some panic happening somewhere else in the stack during a full boot.
I didn’t have any issues on gnome shutting down with the imx8m or a311d on my big reform or pocket reform. The a311d with reforms had some graphical issues but never shut down. Since getting rk3588 both shut down. Though if you are having issues with gnome on the imx8mp now maybe its a recent version of gnome that is to fault for the crashes.
You will have plenty of fun games to play with the rk3588! Its a powerhouse!
Bummer, I too have had it also not work, but most of the time it seems to work. This all started happening recently though. I didn’t have these issues in the beginning at all.
I don’t know if this is really tangential or not, but I have since abandoned Wayfire. I prefer it to Sway, but it just is not getting the love in the development world.
Since moving to Sway on the Pocket I have increased stability and improved functionality. I was used to Sway as it what I used on the Reform. It is good, and you can approach Wayfire functionality with floating windows as well.
Anyway, just mentioning that if you feel like you are getting a lot of bugs or glitches, I would really recommend using Sway. It appears to behave the best on the Pocket.
