Screen needs several attempts to turn on (A311D)

MNT Reform
1

My Reform showed a somewhat strange behavior in the last weeks. When I started it, the OLED display showed everything as usual, but the reforms main screen wouldn’t start/light up. Like if there where no SD-Card inserted. It would take several attempts of starting my Reform until the screen finally would light up (Sometimes up to 10 or more attempts, sometimes 1 or 2). I was thinking maybe a mechanical failure of the SD-Card Slot, so I also tried to reinsert the SD-Card but I couldn’t see a difference in the behaviour.
I did apt upgrade and apt autoremove yesterday, but the problem was still the same, I even didn’t manage to start my Reform properly at all for one day.
Today I it fully charged. Again it needed several attempts. Then I didn’t turn it off the whole day and kept the power plugged in. Now as I’m writing this post I did several Shutdowns and Startups, and everything worked fine.

I’m still a newbie to Linux and Reform and I’m looking for a way to debug this issue. Can anyone help me how I should best proceed?

Thanks for help and patience in advance!

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Hi, a mechanical failure of the SD-Card slot is possible. I had my Reform running fine but inserting an SD-Card would result in just being this printed in dmesg:

mmc0: error -110 whilst initialising SD card

In my case, the problem was probably material fatigue. I was able to restore the original functionality by slightly bending the metal pins through the rectangular hole of the SD-card slot. See this conversation for the full story: 2024-12-04.log

Your problem could of course be a very different one. To find out what’s going on, I would try looking at the serial output of your Reform from another computer. That is you would connect a USB UART adapter to one computer, then connect the RX, TX and GND cables of the adapter to S2 of the Reform (make sure to cross RX and TX) and then start a serial terminal emulator on the computer into which you plugged in the USB UART adapter. This is the part of the Reform handbook that talks about this: Advanced Topics — MNT Reform Operator Handbook, 2nd Edition documentation Once you can see what the Reform does in early boot even without the screen, you might be able to figure out what is going on.

Let us know if you need more help!

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If it is indeed a problem reading from the SD-Card, it could also be that the card itself is failing.

That’s what happened to the card I got with the Reform. Last time I tried to boot from it, it had troubles starting, and I also suspected the SD Card slot being at fault - until I tried to read the SD card on a different computer and had problems there too…

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Thank you, that is some good advice and I try to follow it. First I’ll get a USB UART Adapter and I’ll let you know what shows up when I am ready to set it up.

I ran dmesg but the SD Card seems to work just fine.

Meanwhile I looked at my sway config file and found this section

exec swayidle -w \
               timeout 60 'brightnessctl --save; brightnessctl set 0' \
                       resume 'brightnessctl --restore'\

I wondered if that could have caused some problems with the screen brightness at startup? Could that be as well? I left it out now to see if it changes something.

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It would be very strange if this were the culprit.

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My reform does not keep the brightness value across restarts, so I doubt that’s the cause.

I’d really suggest to plug a serial cable to S2 and read the debug output on a second computer. That’s likely going to be the quickest way to get an idea of what is going on.
I am using this cable, by the way, but there are probably cheaper options available. Just make sure to get one of the correct voltage (3.3V).

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