KB: Phone not/barely charging from power supplies when keyboard is not full

[Phalio]

I absolutely love my keyboard, when it works. I have the same issue where it shows the phone is charging but it is getting so little power from the keyboard (even with the change current allowed) that the phone is discharging. I've shimmed my keyboard twice to help with it but it doesn't work with consistency and the worse part is, if you charge the phone with the keyboard connected you can brick the keyboard. So you can either use the keyboard for a bit, take it off and charge the phone, turn the phone off then attach the keyboard and turn back on (which is ridiculous) or charge the phone with the keyboard on and hope it doesn't get bricked.

I think the fact that Pine64 hasn't really made a public announcement about the massive shortcomings of  the keyboard is pretty gross business tactics. The fact that most users have to physically modify the keyboard just to get it working and they've known this since launch and haven't said anything is very disappointing. I purchased a Pro day 1, keyboard day 1 and a UBPorts edition of the regular Pinephone as well as a Pine Time. So I have given Pine64 about as much business as I can because I like what they are about, but this stuff really turns me off of it. Selling a broken product without telling customers is so disappointing.

I agree that there are many issues with the keyboard and they should be made very clear on the store page so that every customer knows what not to do under any circumstance and that they would have to apply certain workarounds and/or wait for software support to improve. I would consider the current version more of an Explorer Edition, but I believe most issues can/will be solved even with this version. Except for the power supply in phone issue.

Charging works perfectly fine for me with adjusted limits. I believe they reset each time you plug in a cable or reboot, are you sure you have them set correctly for whatever state you are currently in? You can try the aforementioned kbpwrd, though I’ve been experiencing multiple bugs using it or my own attempt at automated limits that make them mostly not work for me, but it does seem to work for kbpwrd’s developer. Or as I’ve done before, make a udev power rule for a permanent set of limits if dynamic limits don’t work. But that will eventually be an issue of the past as Megi has announced automatic charging management for kernel 5.17.2 which I suppose will work even for me. Of course this means that one can’t have this new kernel driver and the userspace driver with custom keymaps at the same time, but fortunately Megi now also announced custom keymaps with the kernel driver. I hope I’ll be able to recreate the same keymap there I use now. I can’t live without my own custom keyboard layouts, especially with the limited amount of keys on this one.

Regarding pin connection issues, have you tried the method I described here? It supposedly works reliably, I’ll record how I do it and report back on if it works again when I decide to give Sxmo a try and take the phone out.

(Written on my PP+KB away from home. Apparently this website has a minimum width that is larger than the PP’s screen in landscape mode at 200% scaling.)