Pocket Reform Stuck At Boot—OLED won't pull up menu

[abbreviatedman]

This is likely related to my attempt to flash the keyboard with a different layout. I moved the hyper/compose key and the enter key (as well as others). You can see the process I took to re-flash it last time here

The OLED comes on when a key is pressed, but it doesn’t switch to the menu when hyper-enter is pressed, neither responding to the old locations for hyper-enter nor to the new locations. I seem to remember the keyboard back-lighting coming on prior to the OLED menu, which doesn’t happen now, but possibly that was the way it always was.

I’m not sure what solutions there are out there, but is there a way to flash the keyboard without it being in programming mode? Or factory reset the board somehow?

[grimmware]

When you moved the hyper key, did you also move it on the hyper layer? If you don’t, iirc, as soon as you start holding the hyper key down it stops being the hyper key.

[abbreviatedman]

I don’t believe I did move it. So it should be in the same place on the hyper layer as it is on the regular layer?

[grimmware]

That was what minute told me on IRC when I was thinking about moving it. I think in general for keyboard firmware you probably want to make sure layer switching keys are consistent across layers unless you’ve got a particular thing in mind and you know the firmware implementation pretty well.

[pff]

There are 2 different issues you need to deal with, one is turning on the pocket without a working keyboard, another is re-flashing the keyboard.

If the pocket is on, you can re-flash a “soft-bricked” keyboard by putting in programming mode manually, pressing reset/prog in the keyboard PCB.

Check this thread:

Flashing the keyboard firmware

I just failed to flash the keyboard firmware for my pocket :grimacing:Well it all succeeded (after putting the keyboard in programming mode), but I think moving the enter key down one row in matrix.h means I can’t use Hyper+Enter in new or old position to boot. Is that expected? The sources made me think it should be fine. Now Hyper+anykey gives me “Press Hyper + Enter for menu. Hold to power up”… have I any options other than disassembly to put the controller in factory mode now?

But… first you need to turn your pocket on without a keyboard. As far as I can tell this requires re-flashing the system controller firmware to “factory mode” which turns on the computer when the power is connected. This can be done from another working computer, through the usb-c connector in the motherboard that accessible after opening the pocket.

There is some information on how to do this here:

Reprogramming the Pocket Keyboard

Yes, it totally is a very good and appreciated idea to work on things like that, if you have the time. I wrote the part of the handbook for flashing the keyboard today. The handbook is not 100% done yet, but you can already use these instructions: Beware that the main issue with bricking the keyboard is that you can’t easily turn the system on. For that, you would need a modified version of the System Controller firmware (on the RP2040 on the motherboard) which auto-powers the device the firs…

[pff]

Maybe you can bring up the OLED and turn on the computer like this:
press original-hyper + press new-hyper + release new-hyper + press enter, in that order.

(original-hyper: hyper in the original configuration, new-hyper: hyper in your new configuration)

The idea would be that when new-hyper is pressed the keyboard switches to the alternative matrix, and at that point original-hyper being pressed keeps it there. If this works, you can turn on the computer from the OLED menu, and then reflash the keyboard with a sane matrix.

[abbreviatedman]

This is all fantastic. I should be able to dive into fixing this cluster tomorrow.

Thanks so much for the guidance!