I’ve been having issues with my Pocket Reform since 20260819 firmware upgrade. I posted a response to Savasten’s thread, but thought it worthwhile to create my own.
Here’s what’s happening
OLED shows normal “hold Hyper+Enter” screen
Selecting Power On or holding combo does nothing
Switching the power switch on and off doesn’t help
Opening the top panel and hitting the SC reset button alone doesn’t work. I then have to reset the keyboard via the OLED menu. This combination is hit or miss
Battery shows 0% / “Not charging” in OS
Once I can get it to boot, the machine is actually running fine and charging (charge LED lit) at the same time /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent shows voltage, current, and charge are all at 0
What I tried
Downgraded SC to 20260808 with no improvement
Went back to 20260819 and still having issues
Went through support.mnt.re and the wizard suggested I try botting from an SD card. This wouldn’t work because I often can’t get the Pocket Reform to boot at all
This issue has made my Pocket Reform unusable. Any help would be appreciated.
Since my initial post, I couldn’t get the device to boot again. The keyboard OLED still worked, but it just wouldn’t boot. I unplugged the keyboard cable (left, closest to the hinge) and that got the Pocket Reform rebooting finally and the battery is now showing the proper voltage and information via cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent.
Once it was up and running again, I connected to the SC’s USB serial console (/dev/ttyACM0) via screen and noticed a bunch of errors related to the keyboard.
Another thing I just noticed. The battery status through the OLED menu shows 0.0 and 9.9 as the individual cell voltages and 0.00a and 0.0 voltage. I assume the keyboard just isn’t communicating with the SC properly.
I’ve rebooted a few times and the Pocket Reform seems to be running normally now. I’m not longer getting the errors I saw in the previous post via the serial console.
I wonder what’s happening that makes the SC go haywire and why unplugging/replugging the keyboard seems to reset it.
Hmm, thanks for all the context + logs, that helps a lot. I’ve also once run into a similar issue where moving the keyboard->sysctl (uart) cable by opening/closing the hinge would inject random characters into the uart. Perhaps the hang you encountered was related to this. We should investigate this with an oscilloscope. Perhaps pullups/downs on the UART pins can be adjusted on either side to combat this phenomenon.
One followup to this. I had to turn my Pocket Reform off (manual switch) for a few days while my HVAC was getting worked on. I turned it back on today and couldn’t get it to restart until I unplugged/replugged the keyboard cable again.
I find myself having to unplug/replug the keybaord often. Almost every couple of days. Once I do that, it works.
One thing to note, I have a luks partition and when I power up the pocket reform often the keyboard is unresponsive. The OLED menu is still responsive and I can turn the Pocket Reform off from there, but I can’t type in my password.
I know that the keyboard isn’t being recognized because I have the LED backlight set to change color when the keyboard is recognized by the system on boot.
I can reboot a few times and it may eventually work, but often I have to unplug the keyboard and then plug it back in.
Does hitting Hyper+enter, then r to reset the keyboard controller work?
I have several times lately had Hyper+Enter 1 or holding Hyper+Enter fail to boot the machine, but if I reset the keyboard with Hyper+Enter r it will then work normally.
Sometimes resetting the keyboard will work, but often I have to unplug the keyboard cable to the left of the OLED and then plug it back in. Before I figured out that solution, I was resetting the SC with the reset button.
