Touchscreen broken, stuck in "Recovery" menu - Is my Bangle JS2 finally bricked?

[dirkhillbrecht]

Hi,

since some months the touch screen of my Bangle JS 2 is broken - the watch simply does not react to any touch gesture whatsoever. As it continued to show the time and was paired with my phone, this was not really a problem for me.

However, today it seemed to have crashed severely: The watch face was frozen, the actual time was shown as small addon in the upper left corner. I issued a hard reset by long-pressing the button and came into a "Recovery" menu. This obviously requires some input via touch which I cannot give due to the hardware issue. So, a bit of a dead end here, eh?

Is there anything I can do? Any chance to repair the touch functionality. Or is this a "Game Over" situation?

Regards,
Dirk

[dirkhillbrecht]

Well…

Touching the button for not-so-long took me out of the "Recovery" screen and everything is fine again. Apart from the broken touch screen. So, that part of the question remains: Any chance to repair this?

[gfwilliams]

Yes, just long-pressing the button is enough to exit recovery (or if you hold it a really long time to reboot and then release the button while booting it'll also go straight in). You can also connect via Bluetooth and type a command like load() to make it load the clock (or you can even load into a specific app with load("appid.app.js")

In terms of the touchscreen, I'm afraid I can't remember exactly what happened. All I can see looking back is a post where you mentioned some issue with E.showMenu? https://github.com/orgs/espruino/discussions/3517

Have you tried latest firmware and a factory reset, just to rule out any potential software issues? And if you paste Bangle.on("touch",print) on the left of the Web IDE and touch the screen (with the Bangle unlocked) do you see anything printed at all?

Also, with the Bangle unlocked, what does running Bangle.touchRd(0xa7) print in the IDE? Ideally it is 182

We do have replacement LCD+touchscreen assemblies, so if it actually is a hardware issue that could be an option - and if you're replacing the screen it's easier to get the old one off as you don't have to worry about damage. You just have to be able to glue the new screen back on (it doesn't come with glue)