[BRLTTY] Orbit Writer bluetooth braille keyboard, key presses do nothing, BRLTTY 5.5 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Emma Sajic on 2022/06/17 at 22:55 +0100]

>I'm attempting to use an Orbit Writer bluetooth braille keyboard with BRLTTY
>5.5 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 

Just a note that 5.5 was released about 5 years ago, so it's rather old. Perhaps it contains some relevant bugs that've been fixed by now. 6.5 is the most recent release.

>BRLTTY starts up OK when I run "sudo brltty" at the terminal, but then when I
>press the keys on the Orbit Writer, nothing happens.

Yes, that's what it looks like in your first log. In your second log, however, it looks like it did eventually work.

>These are the only items where my /etc/brltty.conf differs from the out of
>the box default settings - I set up the bluetooth ID for my Orbit Writer and
>uncommented the pid-file
>
>braille-device	bluetooth:5C:B6:CC:86:F3:75	

Looks okay. You may also want to explicitly specify: braille-driver bm

>Attached is a debug log I got by doing this
>
>$ sudo brltty -ldebug,inpkts,outpkts,bluetooth,brldrv -L brlttydebuglog.txt

Very good! You've clearly done yoru research.

>It looks from the log like my Orbit Writer keyboard is getting detected OK 

Yes, although it took a few tries before it did. I'm not sure why that'd be. There's nothing in the log, i.e. no errors, to hint at why a few driver start attempts were necessary.

>as an Orbit Reader 20 Braille display even though it's a keyboard only with no Braille display output at all on it - this is normal and expected, 

Yes, that's expected. The Orbit Writer emulates an Orbit Reader 20.

>the user manual for the Orbit Writer tells me this.

Yes.

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