MNT Reform FAQ: Common first questions and little problems

MNT Reform
1

These are some common questions that popped up for people who just received their MNT Reform:

  • Q: What’s the correct orientation of the battery pack plugs?
    A: On most of the plugs, there is a painted white/grey dot on the bottom side. The side without the dot has to face up. The plug fits into the receptacle only in one direction.

  • Q: What is the “WiFi Antenna Holder”? What is the mysterious acrylic rectangle in the plastic bag?
    A: They’re one and the same thing! Unfortunately, this is only explained in the DIY manual so far, not in the Operator Handbook. Follow step 18 here: https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/mnt-reform2-diy-manual-r1.pdf

  • Q: There is a blinking battery icon and ???% on the OLED display. What does it mean?
    A: This is normal and means the controller (LPC) hasn’t learned the capacity of your batteries yet. It will go away after the first full charge.

  • Q: Sometimes sound is not working. Pulseaudio Volume Control shows a “Dummy Output”. What’s wrong?
    A: This happens when the reset of wm8960 (DAC) fails during (cold) boot. You can confirm that with dmesg | grep wm8960. A reboot normally makes it work. The cause is still to be investigated – it might be fixable by playing with power sequencing in the LPC firmware.

  • Q: How do I enable the HDMI output?
    A: You can use reform-display-config as the root user to switch between single and dual display configs. Note that single currently gives a higher refresh rate for the internal display. In dual display mode, the internal display is currently run with ~42Hz.

  • Q: How do I change the HDMI resolution in sway?
    A: Add a line like output HDMI-A-1 resolution 1920x1080 to .config/sway/config and reload the configuration (Super+Shift+C)

  • Q: Where is KiCAD?
    A: I made a special build of KiCAD with one patch (that is upstreamed but not yet in Debian) to fix the GPU acceleration on MNT Reform. It is included in the MNT debian repo. The MNT debian repo is already in the APT sources. apt install kicad should give you the right version (kicad_5.1.9+dfsg1-1.1)