Keyboard and trackball unresponsive

[selfawaresoup]

Keyboard issue on boot

I have observed this a bit more with mixed results. The issue is really inconsistent. There was a day recently when the issue was really bad, effectively rendering my Pocket useless for most of the day. But after that day I opened up the keyboard cover and gave everything a good cleaning with a camera sensor cleaner (those little handheld air blower thingies). There wasn’t much dust in there but since the cleaning things have been working perfectly again. I can’t really make sense on this beca…

As mentioned over there, for some reason cleaning the trackball helps. I don’t know how these two things are connected but I’ve seen it multiple times now:

1. the keyboard issue appears (non-responsive or stuck keypresses)
2. I clean the trackball and its sensor with some compressed air
3. the keyboard issue disappears for several weeks.

My guess is that a dirty trackball/sensor somehow causes an issue in the firmware that controls both the trackball and keyboard and leads to the observed keyboard problems, but I’m not able to diagnose these things on the firmware level. I know it sounds weird, but my observations strongly point towards this.