Needed basic Info on using Webcam on PBP

[Arwen]

That's both good, but confusing to new users.

Something that could be improved would be to connect the privacy switch lines also to GPIOs on the SoC.  That way software on Linux could detect "Webcam disabled" and display a message.  Same thing with integrating the wifi off with the Linux rfkill system.

It's probably possible already though the keyboard controller firmware too.

I did put in a feature request of the alternate keyboard firmware that would allow a verbose "lsusb" against the keyboard controller to list the current status of the privacy switches. This would be possible now, without hardware changes. However, Jack's alternate keyboard firmware is not yet complete. It works reliably and does allow some key language changes, and other things not available with the Pine64 version. But, it would be helpful to have the full source capable of being compiled.


One minor issue with the keyboard firmware, (Jack's or the Pine64 version), is that the trackpad sends out packets that aren't needed. (At least that is my understanding.) This can cause issues with Linux kernel drivers, so a work around was implemented. My thought was to have the keyboard controller detect such useless packets and toss them away. Thus, reduce the packets seen by the Linux side. Later if we can, change the trackpad firmware to fix this issue.