06-13-2022, 04:03 PM
Sometime last year I purchased a 3GB PinePhone beta edition with the convergence package. Since then I haven't used it very much but I have been trying to use the phone with the dock recently on a fresh install of the latest stable image of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile. All my packages are up to date and the phone has not been giving me Mali driver crashes like it used to.
However when trying to use the PinePhone with the dock I am noticing a strange problem when attempting to use an external monitor using the HDMI port. Both USB ports work fine with the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have attached, and the ethernet cable and charging port work fine as well. When I plug the entire dock into the PinePhone it detects all of these devices attached to the dock and is able to interface with all of them properly except the external display. So I get power, my keyboard/mouse, and an ethernet connection.
The strange part about this is that the PinePhone is able to determine that it is connected to an external display - the display mode changes to desktop and you are able to see the output options on the touch screen (duplicate display, etc.) However the external display does not detect a signal coming from the PinePhone - most of the time. Occasionally I will see the desktop flicker on my external monitor. Even stranger is that if I hold the dock at a particular angle above the phone itself the image stays, but as soon as I let go and place the dock back down it loses the signal again.
I have tried the Convergence dock on two separate external displays, with two different HDMI cables, and even used a different external USB-C dock with the PinePhone, and the Convergence dock with a different computer to determine what exactly the issue here is. I've come to the conclusion that the issue is probably the PinePhone's USB-C port itself, since the Convergence dock works fine with HDMI output on other devices, the displays themselves are working fine, the common link between all of the problems is the actual PinePhone. The only source of doubt is that the other devices hooked up to the dock will still work even if the HDMI output does not.
I don't know how to fix this issue if my PinePhone has a faulty USB port. I am well outside the warranty period and have no experience with fixing hardware. If anybody has any idea where to start looking in order to fix this I'd appreciate any suggestions.
However when trying to use the PinePhone with the dock I am noticing a strange problem when attempting to use an external monitor using the HDMI port. Both USB ports work fine with the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have attached, and the ethernet cable and charging port work fine as well. When I plug the entire dock into the PinePhone it detects all of these devices attached to the dock and is able to interface with all of them properly except the external display. So I get power, my keyboard/mouse, and an ethernet connection.
The strange part about this is that the PinePhone is able to determine that it is connected to an external display - the display mode changes to desktop and you are able to see the output options on the touch screen (duplicate display, etc.) However the external display does not detect a signal coming from the PinePhone - most of the time. Occasionally I will see the desktop flicker on my external monitor. Even stranger is that if I hold the dock at a particular angle above the phone itself the image stays, but as soon as I let go and place the dock back down it loses the signal again.
I have tried the Convergence dock on two separate external displays, with two different HDMI cables, and even used a different external USB-C dock with the PinePhone, and the Convergence dock with a different computer to determine what exactly the issue here is. I've come to the conclusion that the issue is probably the PinePhone's USB-C port itself, since the Convergence dock works fine with HDMI output on other devices, the displays themselves are working fine, the common link between all of the problems is the actual PinePhone. The only source of doubt is that the other devices hooked up to the dock will still work even if the HDMI output does not.
I don't know how to fix this issue if my PinePhone has a faulty USB port. I am well outside the warranty period and have no experience with fixing hardware. If anybody has any idea where to start looking in order to fix this I'd appreciate any suggestions.