I’ve noticed a capital “T” in the top left corner of the keyboard OLED. It’s there even when the Pocket Reform is off. If I power cycle the switch, it will disappear for a bit, but seems to always come back.
I’ve seen this off and on since I bought my Pocket Reform at the beginning of this year, but it’s been more common lately.
Anyone else experiencing this and what does it mean?
Here’s something interesting. Possibly related, maybe not. Anyway, I updated my Pocket Reform last night and today it won’t boot. The OLED turns and after holding down Hyper+Enter for more than two seconds the OLED goes into it’s normal boot process, but the machine never boots.
When looking at the keyboard menu and selecting “System Status”, I see “error syntax”. When looking at the “Battery Status” menu item, it seems to be going a little wild flashing between nothing but the battery labels and then the actual details of the battery status.
I’ve tried reseting the keyboard multiple times and power cycling the switch multiple times to no avail.
support.mnt.re suggests that you should try turning the power switch (in the tiny slot on the left side of the display toward the keyboard end) off and back on again.
Go to https://support.mnt.re, hit My MNT Device, MNT Pocket Reform, Keyboard’s OLED Display doesn’t react, then A ‘T’ symbol appears on the OLED.
Yeah, I tried that multiple times. Funny thing is, the keyboard is reacting even with the “T”. I finally got it to reboot after leaving it alone for several hours. It’s up and running. The “T” remains even after the machine is booted up.
Okay, now the keyboard is becoming unresponsive even with the machine on, after resetting the keyboard, and going through the power on-off sequence through the keyboard menu. I’m starting to wonder if I have a firmware issue, rp2040 issue, or something else.
This is either a bug in the keyboard firmware or the system controller firmware, it’s probably worth updating both.
The T basically means that the keyboard can’t contact the system controller to get the information it needs to put on the display.
That timeout message appears when the keyboard attempts to contact the system controller and gets no response in about 100 ms. The keyboard gets its power through the same cable that it uses to connect to the system controller. If you are comfortable with the process, you can take the plate off the top of the keyboard and check the connector at the top left (near the left hinge), and then take the plate off the back of the display and check the matching connector on the motherboard. Maybe try unplugging and re-seating them. If you have a multimeter you can also check the wires in the cable for continuity from end to end; those cables do go through the hinge and get flexed.
If you take the plate off the keyboard, be careful of the four rare earth magnets in pockets underneath the plate. In particular, if you then fold the Pocket Reform up to take the back plate off, they will absolutely leap out and stick to their counterparts behind the display bezel and have to be coaxed back into place. 
The packages or the firmware or both? It would be useful to know which sysctl and keyboard firmware you are using. If you have the latest reform-tools installed, then running sudo reform-check will tell you your firmware versions.
It was a simple apt-update/upgrade last night. Looking at the output of refom-check, there are some telling signs.
W: unable to obtain version of system controller firmware – firmware too old?
W: unable to obtain version of keyboard firmware – firmware too old?
I’m guessing I need to update the firmware.
Yeah, I’ve done that at least once.
Yes. You can update your firmware to the latest version by following these steps:
Going forward, you can then use gnome-firmware or fwupd from CLI to keep your sysctl and keyboard firmware up-to-date.
Thanks! My firmware has been updated.
One interesting thing I noticed in the output of sudo reform-check that’s a little confusing.
Toward the top it shows
I: Version of U-Boot: 2024.04-dirty
And at the bottom it shows
I: eMMC contains the latest u-boot version 2024-12-23
Which one should I believe?
The latter.
The fix is in this MR which got merged a few hours ago: https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-rk3588-uboot/-/merge_requests/12
Oh no, wait. This u-boot tag only exists for A311D Pocket Reform. This means that there might be more bugs.
As a reminder for everybody: if you post about your problems, please write down what hardware and software you are running in your initial post.
The problem was also fixed for A311D u-boot in this MR:
But that one did not yet get merged and I think I want to refactor it with what I learned from my RK3588 u-boot build.sh refactor.
Sorry, yeah I’m running the a311d with wayfire.