AsteroidOS
Touch and Bluetooth Issues with KingWear 88 Pro and harmony image.
Hello!
I managed to get the harmony nightly image of 15 October installed on my Kingwear 88 Pro (an MT6580 chip with Android 7 as the base Android underneath) by using an official firmware scatter and replacing the appropriate parts for boot, logo, and userdata to make it work. However, once I have the image installed, there are a few couple things that aren't working like I want them to.
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The touch part of the watch face does not respond (or responds erratically) unless I'm also touching the top of the watchface. If I am touching the top of the watchface in the correct place, I can tap and (very carefully) swipe and the watch accepts the inputs as normal, at least for a little bit.
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Attempting to power off the watch from the settings menu only causes it to lock up and requires me to hold down the button to hard-reboot, at which point the watch works perfectly fine again.
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I was able to successfully pair the official Android companion app (from F-Droid) to the watch exactly once, and since then, the app can find the watch again, but it says it has difficulty communicating with the watch, and the watch does not show up as discoverable or paired on my Android 10 phone's Bluetooth screens. I would really like to have my notifications appear on my phone, but I can't seem to figure out how to get them talking with each other.
I do have access to the Ceres session on the watch, if there are specific logs that can be requested to help understand the situation. I do not, to the best of my knowledge, have adb access. If that would be helpful, I will need to know how to enable adb access and computer trust from within the AsteroidOS or Ceres session.
Thank you for making and maintaining AsteroidOS. I hope there's a solution we can discover for my watch.
With a combination of a new image (an April 2020 image), upgrading AsteroidOSSync to 0.17, or possibly doing a trick for my phone that was supposed to reset Bluetooth when it had gotten out off hand, number 3 on the list is no longer an issue - phone and watch pair with each other and some notifications come through, and that has persisted through phone and watch disconnecting from each other and reconnecting. Numbers one and two on that list are still both problems, although the later firmware has made it less difficult to find the sweet spot to touch for the watch to function.
Sorry for repeating myself, I already wrote an issue about Wifi and Bluetooth are not working on ASUS ZenWatch 3 and Kingwear KW88 Pro running AsteroidOS:
https://github.com/AsteroidOS/asteroid/issues/133
but the Kingwear KW88 Pro is currently as far as I know the most affordable watch which can run AsteroidOS. Therefore I publish here also a copy of a mail I received from Chandler Swift, the developer of “Installing AsteroidOS on the Kingwear KW88 Pro”
https://chandlerswift.com/2020/07/12/asteroidos-on-kw88-pro.html
about Bluetooth and WIFI issues with the Kingwear KW88 Pro. Chandlers experience might be helpful to resolve this issue: I asked Chandler Swift,
“Did Bluetooth and WIFI woirk on your Kingwear KW88 Prowith AsteroidOS?”
Chandlers answer:
"Hi Peter,
I haven't had much luck with either Bluetooth or Wifi, but I haven't tried particularly hard to get them working. I think that LittleFox on the #asteroidos irc channel may know more than I do about getting wifi things working, but that may also be with another watch.
For wifi, the hardware all seems to work and is detected, but wpa_supplicant crashes when I try to connect. I'm guessing, then, that this is a software issue. If I get it figured out, I'll try to remember to let you know, but it's not too high on my priority list.
For Bluetooth, it worked fine with the original firmware, but after flashing AsteroidOS connections have been unstable, generally staying connected somewhere between a few seconds and a few minutes (occasionally hours) at a time. However, I flashed back to stock firmware and I'm still having the same issue, so perhaps something AsteroidOS does modifies some firmware to a corrupt state? I know the MAC address was updated, and may try setting that back -- not sure if that's the only issue though.
If you do have a KW88 Pro, I'd be curious if you can help me do some troubleshooting on the unmodified bluetooth stack, to try to figure out what is different between my broken state and factory, and why re-flashing the firmware doesn't fix it.
Thanks!
Chandler"
Given that not all users of the KW88 Pro experience this touch bug, would deduce that there are multiple different hardware revisions of the KW88 Pro. Recently, Cabir and I had a look into the touch issue. For now it looks like you will need to use two fingers to control AsteroidOS. A simple patch was created so that a second finger is emulated. This did work to some degree, but was less reliable than using the two finger trick (Another bug that this patch introduced was the inability to properly swipe).
I would like to point out that the source code of the kernel used by the MediaTek MT6580 is a mess.
Some more information about the touch screen drivers in the MT6580 kernel:
The main driver is called mtk-tpd. Which is some sort of wrapper for the touchscreen ic. There is an ft5x0x driver that communicates with the touchscreen ic via I2C, this is then forwarded to the mtk-tpd driver. For your information, there are about 57 of those drivers. Only some are enabled by default. It is possible that enabling others will fix the issue. But this introduces another issue: missing files. Enabling any other touchscreen driver needs some manual patch to make it compile. The missing files define what voltage regulator, I2C addresses, etc to use. In other words a lot of testing is needed for that.
All in all you are better of buying a second hand LG G Watch Urbane (bass) or Huawei Watch (sturgeon). These are considered the best supported watches for AsteroidOS.
EDIT: At the time of writing this original post the mentioned patch files weren't published by me (sorry). I've pushed them here: https://github.com/MagneFire/meta-smartwatch-1/commit/511d6050d3138373f58bb9334de0e3b94cdc6882#diff-8496455b8542cb66891a41fb311c6a0a5e67881f0d2e9fd045873252b3d35790 in case anyone wants to debug this issue.
Thank you MagneFire for your detailed information. I updated your recommendation also to the xda developers thread about the Kingwear K88 Pro:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/smartwatch/other-smartwatches/kw88-pro-asteroidos-linux-distribution-t4171413/page3#post83692175
Using a KW99 Pro, issues no. 1 and 2 are still occuring, however no. 3 is resolved.
