Issues with freezes in dongle

[janpfischer]

Hey,
thank you for creating this great Display addition for a dongle.
I am quite extensively testing this module and incoutered some issues around sudden freezes of the whole dongle.
The display becomes unresponsive and no input strokes are being captured.

I can reproduce this by the following (assuming starting fresh with settings reset of dongle and keyboard splits itself)

1. Start the dongle
2. Connect the keyboard halves
3. USB debugging of the dongle shows that new devices are connected
4. Log stream is constant and new messages for each key stroke appear
5. You can now type normally
6. Connect a second device via Bluetooth
7. You can switch to that devices and type normally
8. Optional: Switch back to USB or leave it to bluetooth, does not matter for the following
9. Deactivate Bluetooth in the device which is connected to it (e.g. mobile phone)
10. Log stream stops, even in the middle of a line. Seems to get stuck at some interrupt etc
11. Keyboard unresponsive no keystrokes detected and logged
12. Display unresponsive

In this state a simple restart of the dongle does not help anymore. It boots partly and stucks again at various events. No Logs available again, no keystrokes.
To solve this you have to turn of both keyboard halves via shutting of the battery. Restart the dongle and then turn on the batteries again.
This behavior is 100% reproducible.

I did some more testing and this does not only happen when connecting and disconnecting bluetooth. It is even happening when just restarting the dongle or unplug and replug it when keyboard halves are on.
Most times the first battery bar is loaded and the display get's stuck on the second bar. Sometimes it does not even show the N/A text. Sometimes it get's to N/A but never to the battery value. Everything else is unresponsive then as well.
Fix of this as described above. Turn of keyboard halves, restart dongle, turn on keyboard halves.

If I am using the dongle feature from ZMK in its basic configuration without building it with this module extension and run it on the same controller I do not have any of these issues. If I disconnect the bluetooth client the keyboard falls back to USB and I can continue typing. I can then reenable bluetooth and the dongle connects again to my phone.

If I can I am ready to do further testing and debugging if needed.

[SonDinh5310]

I can confirm that I'm currently experiencing this issue too. Have you found a workaround or a fix for this @janpfischer ?

[janpfischer]

Hi @SonDinh5310 ,
sadly I was not able to fix this issue with this module. Since I was not able to pin the problem down I decided to create my own module based of the amazing work here and the other dongle display.
Maybe you want to give my custom dongle screen a try which includes even more features like this one.
It includes a WPM counter, a modifier display and an automatic dim/turn off of the screen after 10 minutes (customization) of inactivity. Furthermore you can dim and brighten the display by using your keyboard.

https://github.com/janpfischer/zmk-dongle-screen

With my module I did not encounter the above mentioned connectivity issues once.
I am curious about your feedback :)

[SonDinh5310]

@janpfischer thank you, I will try it out when I have the time 👍🏻

[pageegap]

hello! I've been using YADS for the last two weeks and I liking it a lot. I just experienced though that the dongle got stuck a couple of times. I happened when scrolling (I am driving a charybdis mini). Quick fix was just to turn off/on the dongle but I was wondering if anyone had seen the same issue and possible fix?

thanks!

[janpfischer]

Hi @pageegap, I would suggest to open up a issue in the YADS repo for better visibility.
Do I understand it correctly that this keyboard has a scrollwheel? Maybe it is related more to ZMK than YADS.

It would be helpful if you could provide logging from the dongle as well.

[Percentnineteen]

I'm not seeing exactly the same behavior. In my case, the moment I connect one peripheral device, the display becomes unresponsive and logging halts. The dongle seems to work normally. I can even connect a second peripheral and the dongle transfers keypresses to a paired device.

I tracked this down to being an issue with the fade in/out animations for the battery bars. I found that increasing the LV_Z_MEM_POOL from 10000 to 16834 in boards/shields/prospector_adapter/Kconfig.defconfig stopped this from happening. I still need to do some more testing before I am confident in declaring that this is the fix, though.

[pageegap]

I'm not seeing exactly the same behavior. In my case, the moment I connect one peripheral device, the display becomes unresponsive and logging halts. The dongle seems to work normally. I can even connect a second peripheral and the dongle transfers keypresses to a paired device.

I tracked this down to being an issue with the fade in/out animations for the battery bars. I found that increasing the LV_Z_MEM_POOL from 10000 to 16834 in boards/shields/prospector_adapter/Kconfig.defconfig stopped this from happening. I still need to do some more testing before I am confident in declaring that this is the fix, though.

oh that's interesting. I enabled the logs and did some testing but at each time the dongle froze I did not see any error message or anything that suggested something went wrong... so I had given up and was planning to "undongle" my Charybdis. I see in the logs these messages though:

[12:42:38.018,920] <dbg> zmk: bvd_sample_fetch: ADC raw 1448 ~ 1272 mV => 3766 mV
[12:42:38.018,951] <dbg> zmk: bvd_sample_fetch: Percent: 43
[12:42:38.018,981] <dbg> zmk: zmk_battery_update: Setting BAS GATT battery level to 43.
[12:42:48.723,724] <dbg> zmk: split_central_battery_level_notify_func: [BATTERY LEVEL NOTIFICATION] data 0x20034da7 length 1
[12:42:48.723,754] <dbg> zmk: split_central_battery_level_notify_func: Battery level: 78
[12:42:48.723,815] <dbg> zmk: peripheral_event_work_callback: Trigger key position state change for 78
[12:42:48.723,876] <dbg> zmk: set_battery_symbol: source: 0, level: 78, usb: 0

there are some messages on the battery levels... so I may give your solution a try.

[Percentnineteen]

By default, LVGL doesn't seem to log -- try adding CONFIG_LV_USE_LOG=y and CONFIG_LV_LOG_PRINTF=y. If you're using a build.yaml, this line should work:
cmake-args: -DCONFIG_LV_USE_LOG=y -DCONFIG_LV_LOG_PRINTF=y

I was seeing this:
Error] (6.167, +6167) lv_mem_realloc: couldn't allocate memory (in lv_mem.c line #211) [Error] (6.167, +0) lv_mem_buf_get: Asserted at expression: buf != NULL (Out of memory, can't allocate a new buffer (increase your LV_MEM_SIZE/heap size)) (in lv_mem.c line #312)