reTerminal user buttons not visible after upgrades

Products & Technology Single Board Computers
#1

Hello-

After upgrading the STM firmware to 1.8, flashing the “32-bit 2022-07-21-Raspbian-reTerminal” image, and running the dtoverlay script, the front user-defined buttons cease to work, and it’s not listed in evtest available devices.

Did I miss a step, has anyone had this issue? How to debug?

I saw the same behaviour with the latest vanilla Raspbian-lite image. My goal is to run openbox-session only and have the front buttons switch desktops (its so fast when it works)

#2

Hi, please try to reinstall the driver

#3

Hello Liu, thank you for your help. I have reinstalled the driver following the instructions exactly, but same result of no front buttons.

So I tried some experiments. Firmware version is latest 1.8 confirmed by running i2ctransfer -y 1 w1@0x45 0x97 r2 with response 0x01 0x08.

32bit 2022-07-21

  • Seems to contain 2022-06-19 image below

32bit 2022-06-19-Raspbian-reTerminal.img

  • Like brick, or not boot very far at all
  • attempted flashing 3 times to be certain

32bit 2021-06-02-Raspbian-reTerminal.img

  • image boots
  • front buttons work and exist as /dev/input/event0 gpio_keys
  • ran dtoverlays script, no obvious errors, rebooted
  • no front buttons
  • apt upgrade
  • still no front buttons
  • ran dtoverlays script again (to be certain), rebooted
  • still no front buttons?

32bit 2023-02-01 official raspberry pi os lite (my preferred setup)

  • image boots
  • no hardware support (as expected)
  • ran dtoverlays script, rebooted
  • hardware works but no front buttons
  • apt upgrade
  • no front buttons

I am not able to get a working configuration yet

#4

Hello.
Please try brushing in this image at
https://files.seeedstudio.com/wiki/ReTerminal/RPiOS_Images/2022-07-21-Raspbian-reTerminal-arm64/32bit-20220721T012743Z-001.zip
Open the evtest tool and enter 0.
Press F1.F2.F3.F4,and check their corresponding codes.
Open the config.txt and put
dtoverlay=reTerminal,tp_rotate=1
to
dtoverlay=reTerminal,key0=0x100,key1=0x101,key2=0x102,key3=0x103,tp_rotate=1
The specific value depends on the actual code of F1,F2,F3,F4

#5

Hello,

Yes I follow this procedure, but it’s not a good solution, because the wiki says I can use any official image and other tooling to build custom images. So that is why I bought this product, to use official Raspberry Pi image

Will there be an update to drivers please? I can use at least another 3 reTerminals if this happens! Surely I am not alone

Thank you

#6

I tried again today from scratch, and I believe it works

The front buttons (and buzzer, LCD backlight and other things) connect to the Internal Expansion Chip MCP23008-E/PCA9554 in turn connected to the onboard STM32 microcontroller. So all this must work ok. My method…

First the eMMC was flashed with official Raspbian Lite Bullseye 64-bit image. Then dtoverlays were installed but I edit the script to not change linux kernel version.

My expansion chip is the older MCP23008, and flashed it with the latest v1.9.

Then edit /boot/config.txt to have dtoverlay=reTerminal,tp_rotate=1,addr=0x20,mcp23008,key0=0x03b,key1=0x03c,key2=0x03d,key3=0x03e

And edit /boot/cmdline.txt to append fbcon=rotate:1

Now all hardware works as expected in the demo Python scripts, front buttons are mapped to F1-F4, etc.

Why not working before? I don’t remember upgrading the microcontroller firmware (thinking it was only controlling the LCD). Also the config.txt mcp23008 is new I think.

Very happy now :partying_face: