Broken Spacebar on PBP ISO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I have a sad story. I was just flying across country with my ISO PBP, enjoying its terrific battery life from an unpowered economy seat.

A fellow passenger had a minor accident with their tray table, and red wine splashed across the top of my machine. I got quickly to work with paper napkins, but liquid seeped into the spaces under the key caps - especially the space bar.

I shut down, and continued drying, daring to restart after a couple hours. The damage? Tab, L-ALT and spacebar were non-functional. I played with travel on the keys, and after an evening in hotel, tap returned to functioning. L-ALT is iffy, and spacebar is still a dead response. On returning home, I fully discharged the machine and floated high-concentration isopropyl into the crevasses with a cotton swab, in the hopes that it wold work as a gunk-remover, and improvised contact cleaner. I put on a low-level heating pad for a couple hours, to dry out and recharged.

No luck. Spacebar travels normally, but sends no characters.

An odd thing. With a terminal open, bashing the space several times stops cursor blinking in Gnome-terminal, but no null character space updates on screen, or otherwise registers. After the cursor "freezes", It takes a couple of presses of ENTER to make this responsive, and return a new prompt. Then I get several, like they were piled up in a buffer and all released at once.

Anyway, very frustrating. I just had Daniel's excellent Debian installer imaged as I like, with a hybrid arm64/armhf, the zram service working, and Gnome3 customized to my extensions and preferences. On the up side, I have 20+ tabs synced in Firefox, and she's dead steady, other than some screen tearing on repaint of scrolled pages.

I'm open to any suggestions here. I wish there were simple spare-parts ordering of new ISO KB units on the Pine Store. I'd hate to retire this one to USB/Bluetooth KB only - tho I have an ANSI unit on which I can swap my eMMC.

Thanks all, and BE CAREFUL! These KB are not sealed membranes, it seems.

[Der Geist der Maschine]

No luck. Spacebar travels normally, but sends no characters.

An interim solution is remapping the right ALT key to the space key via xmodmap. By this, you can use the keyboard at least to some degree.

Not sure if you get much out of that, but what does xev show? Nothing or something obscure?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

No luck. Spacebar travels normally, but sends no characters.

An interim solution is remapping the right ALT key to the space key via xmodmap. By this, you can use the keyboard at least to some degree.

Not sure if you get much out of that, but what does xev show? Nothing or something obscure?

Thanks, good thinking.

Argh.

xev shows nothing for L-ALT, SPACE, and R-ALT Gr.

If I want to remap SPACE, I have to find another sacrificial key.

[tllim]

No luck. Spacebar travels normally, but sends no characters.

An interim solution is remapping the right ALT key to the space key via xmodmap. By this, you can use the keyboard at least to some degree.

Not sure if you get much out of that, but what does xev show? Nothing or something obscure?

Thanks, good thinking.

Argh.

xev shows nothing for L-ALT, SPACE, and R-ALT Gr.

If I want to remap SPACE, I have to find another sacrificial key.

You are contact sales team @sales@pine64.org, and mentioned you needs the Pinebook Pro low case with keyboard as replacement. They can quote you (same price as Pinebook one) and order one for you. The replacement of the low case takes about 15 minutes.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

No luck. Spacebar travels normally, but sends no characters.

An interim solution is remapping the right ALT key to the space key via xmodmap. By this, you can use the keyboard at least to some degree.

Not sure if you get much out of that, but what does xev show? Nothing or something obscure?

Thanks, good thinking.

Argh.

xev shows nothing for L-ALT, SPACE, and R-ALT Gr.

If I want to remap SPACE, I have to find another sacrificial key.

You are contact sales team @sales@pine64.org, and mentioned you needs the Pinebook Pro low case with keyboard as replacement. They can quote you (same price as Pinebook one) and order one for you. The replacement of the low case takes about 15 minutes.

Thanks! I'm going to try it.