RO5 hates my Ducky One!
James Wheeler (3283) 344 posts |
I’m getting into RO5 quite a bit I since first joined the community, and I want to start using it more. The thing is, when first trying out RO, I mostly grabbed together some scraps to get up and running. This included a membrane keyboard. I hate membrane keebs and prefer mechanicals, but since I wasn’t using RO all that much, I could bear with it. Now RO has become my favourite OS. It’s my primary platform for DTP, and honestly, I want to start using it more, but I despise membrane keyboards. Enter the Ducky One. I plugged it into the Pi, powered on, and RO5 froze on boot! Well, the Ducky has NKRO, something some OSes don’t like. I flicked the toggle switch disabling NKRO, so now it should behave as a 6KRO keeb, then repowered the Pi but, no luck. Unplugged keeb, powered cycled and it booted up fine. Then I plugged in my Ducky, and it worked! For about 5 seconds. Then RO5 ground to a halt, mouse and all. The only thing I can think of is that Ducky likes to negotiate at USB 2, so latency is low. Possibly RO5 is surprised to find a keeb asking for USB 2? Any ideas on how to proceed? Do I need another keyboard? I know Elesar did a mechanical keeb a while ago, but it had MX Brown switches (not a fan), and I’d prefer MX Blues. |
Rick Murray (539) 13393 posts |
In my experience, find the cheapest crappiest keyboard you can tolerate the action of, and buy that. I have numerous keyboards that “work okay with Windows” but fail in various ways on RISC OS. Only one (enhanced media keyboard with touchpad) actually stiffs RISC OS – that’s a better result than my tests with Raspian! In short, if there is anything fancy about the keyboard, avoid it…
??? You’d need to be one of those multi fingered type-bots from Ghost in the Shell in order to run into latency problems with a keyboard at USB1.1 – either that or a really s****y OS (even Windows can cope with that!). That it is doing things in a non standard way implies it is a non standard keyboard. I do wonder what sort of data these devices are sending – my touchpad keyboard works okay until I use the touchpad at which point instant freeze. Maybe it’s trying to shove mouse data into the keyboard buffer? Maybe it’s shoving 64 bytes where a couple are expected? I don’t know. I just know there’s a lot of fancy things that don’t behave nicely. |
James Wheeler (3283) 344 posts |
I’m not going to do that.
It’s a gaming feature I believe to make USB viable since PS2 keebs had hardware interrupts but USB not so much. |
Rob Basath (3237) 28 posts |
I can add to this thread, that my ‘Gamer Keyboard’ (Razer Deathstalker), which I bought because of it specs (I’m not a Gamer at all), is not received well by RO5. The OS does not crash, but characters are missing while I type. But this behaviour is only true when connecting it to the Raspberry Pi. Once I switched to ARMX6 (it’s a Wandboard), the issues dissapeared. My theory: it is not the keyboard itself, but the rPi’s hardware, that causes the issues. Maybe it can be patched or a workaround can be created. |
James Wheeler (3283) 344 posts |
I think the deathstalker is backlit, so may be causing power draining issues. The Achilles heel of the Pi. I think Rick may be right about the multimedia keys, or it could be because USB 2 isn’t the best on RO. Either way, finishing work on USB sync with netbsd would most likely help. Will have to wait and see. |