Trackpad woes

[shawnanastasio]

As I discovered in https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10326, the issue has nothing to do with the trackpad. When PSR fails like this (indicated by those kernel messages in dmesg) the panel skips multiple frames frequently, which makes it look like the trackpad isn't responding. My patch for disabling PSR resolves this issue at the cost of potentially increasing power usage. It seems this may be a hardware issue with the most recent batch of pinebooks.

[HeartMeeple]

You can improve the feel of the touchpad/trackpad by reducing the minimum speed of the pointer to 0. Here's how.

Manjaro launcher > Applications > Settings > System Settings > Touchpad > Pointer Motion Tab

The reason this reduction of minimum speed works is that the minimum pointer speed sets how far the pointer must travel when a touch is detected. By having the motion move a minimum distance the cursor cannot move a single pixel at a time. The minimum motion setting makes the motion behave as if it is on a grid. That means to get the cursor to a precise position you rely on cursor acceleration setting to add pixel offsets to the grid behaviour. That feels bad like you are overshooting your click targets, or you have to make a second pass to get to the location that you want to put the cursor, or you lift your finger and the cursor the acceleration causes the cursor move an additional minimum distance unit which feels like there is lag on the input.

[robt]

Yesterday, I felt like taking some risk, so I opened up my pinebook Pro to see why the touch pad was sticking up on the right hand side.
I found a foamy ground connector to be the culprit, so I took out a bit of foam, now it looks and feels much better.
It's still a bit uneven, because I didn't want to risk having no connect at all.
See the photos.

Here's the foamy bit indicated by the arrow:

  Screenshot_20200626-225341.jpg (Size: 119.81 KB / Downloads: 334)

And here is the result:

  Screenshot_20200626-225313.jpg (Size: 40.49 KB / Downloads: 346)