[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 2022/07/03 at 15:47 +0100]

>I edited my brltty.conf and am now able to type in US Computer Braille OK 

I don't know which country you're in, but you might find en_CA better. It isn't an official standard, but, living in Canada, I wanted it to at least make reading/typing French accented letters easy. It also supports German and Italian, as well as various other special characters.

>These are the only lines that differ from the 6.5 out of the box brltty.conf
>file:
>
>braille-driver	bm	
>braille-device	bluetooth:5C:B6:CC:86:F3:75
>text-table	en-nabcc	# English (North American Braille Computer Code)
>pid-file /run/brltty/brltty.pid

Looks okay.

>I have now hit a problem on Bluetooth however. brltty is not connecting to my
>Orbit Writer keyboard over Bluetooth and when I type hello nothing happens.

Well, if it isn't connecting then typing on it won't work. Unless, of course, you've paired your Orbit Writer to appear as an actual Bluetooth keyboard. If you do that, however, ten yoyu'd be stuck with its internal table because it wouldn't then go through brltty.

>Seems like the keyboard is flicking between a connected and disconnected
>state very quickly.

Perhasp brltty's driver is restarting.

>brltty -n -e -ldebug -L /tmp/brltty-debug-bluetooth.log

You might try adding the bt log category, i.e. -ldebug,bt. Note that, in 6.5, the bluetooth log category was renamed to bt.

>I'm getting a variety of error messages including device busy and Braille
>driver not found. 

Braille driver not found implies a build or install error.

>See attached log.

I shall.

># Check I have all dependencies needed to build brltty properly for Ubuntu
>18.04 LTS (found a Debian list in brltty github repo in Tools/reqpkgs.debian)
># using technique here https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-test-for-installed-package-using-shell-script-on-ubuntu-and-debian

You could actually do this by running: ./reqpkgs -i
-i, as you might guess, means install. There's also -l, which lists the missing packages. The reqpkgs script has a -h option.

># Getting an error message when running make install
...
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "./setup.py", line 21, in <module>
>    from setuptools import setup, Extension
>ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'setuptools'
...
># To fix I had to install setuptools for python 3 like this
># (wasn't mentioned in Tools/reqpkgs.debian - should it be?)
...
>sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools

Yes, it should. Now done. Thank you for figuring it out. I guess more modern systems have it already installed, but, yes, if older ones don't then we should be exlicitly requiring it.

># Make install now succeeding but still got the same problem with Bluetooth
>connectivity described above.

I'll have a look at your log, but a log with the bt log category enabled would be better.

>It would be good to get Bluetooth working but if that's not possible at least
>I can use USB and type in US Computer Braille now.

It should be possible.

>Am wondering how much of this has to do with me being on Ubuntu.

Nothing. Some of it, however, might have to do with you using an older installation.

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