Journey to Bluetooth Keyboard interference on iMac

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-15 by user71257

Hi,

I have received my puck, and validated that it is alive by getting red and green neons to flash.

My Ubuntu 16.06 LTS MacBook Pro 2013 cannot detect the puck, though I have followed the bluetooth upgrade. I can no longer boot into OSX on this machine so cannot determine if the hardware is good enough.

Both my children's macs are too old.

On the iMac I was able to connect and upload the demo, but a ghost keyboard started typing on the machine until I took the battery out.

cheers
timp

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-12-15 by @gfwilliams

Which demo did you upload? And what did the ghost keyboard start typing?

The easiest way to test if your Ubuntu machine can even detect BLE is to run sudo hcitool lescan - if it supports bluetooth LE should should see the Pucks being reported. You could also give the command-line application a try

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-15 by user71257

I uploaded the default demo in the IDE:

var on = false;
setInterval(function() {
on = !on;
LED1.write(on);
}, 500);

The ghost keyboard, this time, only used left and right arrows, though last time I remember characters.

This time the ghost only appeared after disconnecting and reconnecting.

It made it impossible to edit the demo to change it.

I will try harder with the ubuntu machine, thanks for the tip.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-12-15 by @gfwilliams

Wow, I have absolutely no idea what could be happening. At that point Puck.js is doing nothing with Bluetooth LE - or even printing characters to the screen - so I don't really see how it could be affecting your keyboard.

What do you mean by 'Ghost keyboard' - do you have a link or image?

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-15 by user71257

By ghost keyboard I mean that the screen is responding to characters, primarily left and right arrow keys. I can place the cursor in a new position in the buffer (in EspruinoIDE) and it will run to beginning or end of buffer, one character at a time, at a perceptible rate (8/8 time?).

When I disconnect from puck the effect goes away, but this time my keyboard had disconnected and would not reconnect.

I replaced the batteries in the keyboard and the ghost has gone away. I guess that this is an odd end of battery life phenomenon.

I am now able to start using my puck, so I am not so bothered about accessing if from Ubuntu.

Thanks for your support.