Bluetooth died; reflashing solved for now
Hi! I just had a strange thing happen with my Corne—Bluetooth totally died. The batteries for both halves were both at 100%, but the only way I could use the board was to plug the left side in via USB-C.
I tried a bunch of stuff, resetting, turning on-off, trying other devices which I had paired the board with on other BT slots, using the BT-CLR key on the board and trying to restart the pairing process, but it was definitely the board and not my Mac; no other device saw it either.
In the end, what solved it was reflashing the board from my latest firmware. Then it showed up immediately.
I'm starting to understand why ZSA refuse to make wireless boards 😆
Anyone else see something like this? Any possible mitigations to avoid it happening again? Why might reflashing have resolved the issue?
4 Replies
That's definitely a strange issue! It sounds like you did a great job troubleshooting by trying different devices and clearing the bonds.
It's hard to say exactly why reflashing resolved the issue, but it's possible there was a minor corruption in the firmware that was preventing the Bluetooth from initializing correctly. Reflashing essentially gives the nice!nano a fresh start.
To potentially mitigate this in the future, you could try building your own firmware with the increased transmit power and disabled 2M PHY options enabled. This can sometimes help with connection stability. You can find more information on this in our troubleshooting documentation here: https://docs.typeractive.xyz/troubleshooting/poor-range
You can also find the ZMK config repositories for the Corne Wireless to build your own firmware here: https://docs.typeractive.xyz/build-guides/corne-wireless/firmware
If you encounter this again or have more questions, feel free to reply to this message!
Poor Range | Typeractive.xyz Documentation
Solve poor wireless range with your ZMK keyboard.
Firmware | Typeractive.xyz Documentation
If you're not familiar, ZMK is a wireless-focused firmware, and it powers our Corne Wireless.
Humm, yeah, my GPT-based rummaging seems to lead to the conclusion "shrug, it's open source, stuff happens". Guess I'll just make sure I have a USB-C cable and my firmware on hand at all times
Hey, this may be related to ZMK's preferred output selection:
https://zmk.dev/docs/keymaps/behaviors/outputs
You can map "&out OUT_BLE" to a keycode to force it to prefer bluetooth out rather than USB out, or OUT_USB for the reverse, or just &out OUT_TOG to toggle between.
That'd be my guess on what happened is it was preferring USB out for some reason
Oh that’s interesting! Any idea how it might’ve switched? I definitely don’t have it bound anywhere.
Thanks heaps for the response!
I was wondering to whether it might have actually been the simple act of plugging it in and messing with the USB connection which actually fixed it – I bought the solder free headers thinking that I would just minimise the risk of any damage to the board by simply not soldering at all, but it’s given me no end of trouble
I’m constantly having to press the microcontroller back in