01-04-2022, 05:36 PM
I should start by saying I have found a way to temporarily fix the issue on my pinephone, but hopefully this will be useful for others regardless.
I received my pinephone roughly 7 months prier to this post, and while I was enjoying and getting good use out of the device, the microphone started having random bouts of noise & static to the point that it was unusable, no matter what distro was installed. after taking the phone partially apart, I narrowed the issue down to physical pressure on the microphone mounted to the daughter board. It seems that almost anything that puts pressure on the microphone can cause or fix this issue, namely whether or not the battery is installed, charged, expanding, contracting, how tightly the three screws holding in the daughter board are tightened, whether the backplate or case is installed, etc. Even putting a piece of duct tape in between the battery and the plastic holding in the daughter board can cause the mic to be unusable.
This issue strikes me as one that could be inadvertently be the cause of many bug reports to distro & modem firmware maintainers, as I haven't seen anyone online having this sort of issue, so hopefully this post can clear this up.
The next steps for dealing with this issue are probably a small note about it in the wiki and dealing with it on a hardware level for future revisions, as I think end users would find the microphone being unusable half the time to be unacceptable for a released smartphone. I should also point out that I can only confirm this issue effects the Pine64 PinePhone (1.2) Hardware Model, so comment below if you can reproduce the issue in older revisions or the pinephone pro.
I received my pinephone roughly 7 months prier to this post, and while I was enjoying and getting good use out of the device, the microphone started having random bouts of noise & static to the point that it was unusable, no matter what distro was installed. after taking the phone partially apart, I narrowed the issue down to physical pressure on the microphone mounted to the daughter board. It seems that almost anything that puts pressure on the microphone can cause or fix this issue, namely whether or not the battery is installed, charged, expanding, contracting, how tightly the three screws holding in the daughter board are tightened, whether the backplate or case is installed, etc. Even putting a piece of duct tape in between the battery and the plastic holding in the daughter board can cause the mic to be unusable.
This issue strikes me as one that could be inadvertently be the cause of many bug reports to distro & modem firmware maintainers, as I haven't seen anyone online having this sort of issue, so hopefully this post can clear this up.
The next steps for dealing with this issue are probably a small note about it in the wiki and dealing with it on a hardware level for future revisions, as I think end users would find the microphone being unusable half the time to be unacceptable for a released smartphone. I should also point out that I can only confirm this issue effects the Pine64 PinePhone (1.2) Hardware Model, so comment below if you can reproduce the issue in older revisions or the pinephone pro.