Universal Wireless Keyboard driver crash

[Dreadnought1906]

Hi everybody,

I'm having a problem with my Palm Universal Wireless Keyboard driver on my Z22. I've searched high and low, and I just can't seem to find anybody who's had exactly the same problem. I contacted Palm, and they don't seem to care,* so I'm hoping againt hope that you clever palm wizzards will be able to spot what I'm doing wrong.

Here's the puzzle:

The driver for the keyboard keeps turning itself off. Not the keyboard, mind, you, the driver. There is a toggle switch at the top of the driver preferences screen that allows you to turn it on and off, and this starts flipping itself to off. When you press 'ON', it immediately flips back to off again, and the keyboard won't respond.

This 'crash' (if that's what it is) happens very intermittently. Sometimes I will go twelve hours without a crash, sometimes it happens several times an hour.

I have re-installed the driver many times, I have the latest driver, and I have ruled out IR interference. It doesn't seem to be linked to interference from any particular programme, unless it's Datebk6 or Documents to Go, which seems unlikely, as they're so common.

Does anybody have any ideas? It's driving me batty.

I'd be very grateful indeed if any of you could help.



*honestly, what kind of an organisation sheilds its developers from bug reports?!

[alt236]

Hmmm... did you try deleting and reinstalling the driver?

Also, do you have anything else that might be using the IR port? Like Piloc for example?

[Dreadnought1906]

Those are good thoughts. Yes, I did try deleting and reinstalling the driver, but unfortunately without effect. I even tried both the 1.13 and 1.08 drivers to see if there was some kind of compatibility issue with my machine, but that didn't help.

I don't have any other software that claims to use the IR port, BUT I've noticed that beaming seems to work regardless of the state of the driver. I can send and receive beamed items even when the driver is running. Do you think the OS might be taking over the IR port from the driver and causing a problem?

Thanks for the help.

[alt236]

The OS shouldn't be able to steal the IR without a reason...

Do you have UnCache installed? Have you added the driver (it's called keyboard) to the list?

It might be a good idea to post what apps you have installed :)

[Church Punk]

yes, if you are using UnCache then the app should be on the list.

But i think that the problem here is that the keyboard (drivers) are turning themselves off after a period of time. This can be changed on the power saving option (detect keyboard within __ secs).

The keyboard works the following way:

-You turn on your device.
-The drivers search for IR signal from the keyboard.
-If any key is pressed before the time that is set, the drivers will say on UNTIL your device switches off, OR until the "release IRda afer inactivity periond time" is reached. If no key is pressed then the drivers will be turned off after the time set, and you will be NOT able to use your keyboard. If this happens, turn off your device, wait 5~10 secs, turn it on and press any key (up, down etc...), enjoy your keyboard :).

To avoid this, put the palm on the keyboard with anticipation before you turn your device on. And press any key as soon as you turn it on.

hope this helps, gl

[Dreadnought1906]

Thanks for the suggestions.

No, I don't have UnCache installed. I noticed that being a problem in a previous thread, so I made sure not to install it.

Thanks for the comment about the power saving mode, Church Punk. Unfortunately, I don't think this is the cause of the problem for three reasons:
1. When the driver turns off because of power saving, you can normally just switch the driver back on manually. When the crash occurs, the power switch cannot be set to on. It just flips back to 'off' immediately.
2. Switching the machine on and off has no effect. When the driver has crashed, it stays crashed until you soft-reset.
3. The problem occurs when driver power saving is totally switched off.

For the record, here is a complete list of software on the machine, drawn uncritically from my 'Category' menu:

Quick Tour
Analogue Uhr
Astro Info
Bibliopalm
Blocks
Calc
Calendar
CheckSplit
Chess
CoconutFern
Contacts
CrazyDaisy
DateBk6
dbAddr
dbIcon+
dbMemo
dbScan
dbSetup
dbSetup6
dbTodo
dbView
Documents (Documents to Go)
EasyPulse
eReader
Expense
FileZ
Hearts
HotSync
IrBattleship
Keyboard (this is the keyboard driver itself)
marsclock
Memos
MetrO
Note Pad
Parking Lot
Photos (SplashPhoto)
powerOne Personal
Prefs
Progect
Railroad
Sea War MP
Sea Wars 3D
Sol Free
Tasks
TikTok
World Clock
Yaps
Yesterday
Yoda

And that's it.

A quick question: do other people who have this keyboard find they can still send and receive things through the IR port when the keyboard driver is running? According to the keyboard manual, this is not supposed to happen, but it is definitely the case with my machine.

Oh, and a further thought (please understand, I know very little about this, and I'm trying to think of everything I can): Before I had this Z22, I had a Clie PEG-TJ35 with a Sony keyboard. I had trouble migrating the files over, so I just hotsynced the files from one to the other. I tried to delete the old keyboard driver, but I'm worried there may be some remnants behind that are messing things up. For example, I was going through files on the machine and found JogAssistLoader, which seems to be a Sony-specific file. Is there anything else I should be looking out for?

Thanks, everyone, for all your help.

[pippadid]

I have had this exact same problem on my LifeDrive. I also have the Universal Keyboard Driver 1.08. I have UnCache installed and Keyboard is listed in my uncache app list but I had the problem before I ever installed uncache. So that isn't the problem. I can't tell you when or why it occurs, it seems to be random that it does this. The only thing that solves the problem for me is to hard reset OR uninstall the driver and then reinstall it and let it do it's soft reset. I have some of the same programs installed that you do.
Crazy Daisy
eReader
Filez
Hearts
Splash Photo
Sol Free
(I didn't list the rom apps)
I am not sure if it's a third party problem or not. Maybe we can figure something out to solve this problem. Thanks, Cindy.

[alt236]

It might be that there are remaining files from your clie days on your zire.

If that is the case they only way to solve this (along with a number of problems that might occur randomly over time) is to hard reset and reinstall everything...

Can you backup on a card? (can't remember the specs of a z22)

[BrentDC]

Z22 doesn't have a card slot, Hotsync only.

[Dreadnought1906]

Well, I rid my hand-held of everything Sony related, and installed software on it from scratch and, alas, the crash still occurs. I was able to invoke the crash several times, this evening, by doing nothing more than write notes into memos, a built in programme on the ROM.

I think this is looking more and more like a bug in the driver itself. Does anybody know how we might be able to get some attention from the driver developers, or is this a hopeless case?

[Dreadnought1906]

It occurs to me that this problem might be a lot less bad if there were a way of 'killing' the keyboard driver and restarting it without resetting the entire device. Does anybody know if there is a way of restarting a single programme in palm? I'm afraid I'm not (as you might have sussed by now) an expert!

[alt236]

Apologies for dissapearing I had to format my PC. :(
Did you do a hard reset or did you go through the files od the palm?

[Dreadnought1906]

Oh dear! My commiserations about your PC.

What I did with my own troublesome machine is this:
- back it up
- move the backup files to a new directory
- hard reset the palm
- copy essential files (such as the date book and memo files outside the 'backup' folder) to the new backed up files
- resync the palm - I now have all my original calender events and todo's, etc.
- freshly install each piece of software

I think this stands a good chance of having got rid of every file that might be left over from the Sony.

The only spot of trouble came when I tried to install Documents to Go. You can't install the palm .prc files directly with my version of this software: you have to use a windows installer. But the windows installer crashed out during the middle of the install with the message that it couldn't find CiAPI.dll. Fortunately, the software is already installed on the windows end, and it seemed to have already generated the appropriate files to be copied to the palm, so it all seemed to work.

[alt236]

Indeed this should have cleaned up everything....
Hm.... it gets tricky. Did you try the newest drivers with this setup?

[Dreadnought1906]

Yes, the newest driver. You don't think it could be this fault with Docs to Go do you?

I've also tried playing around with the settings in the driver to see if there's some configuration which avoids the crash and also I've tried copy protecting the file in case it's getting over-written and corrupted by something. No result.

While googling around, I found the UnCache website, which says that on boot up there's a Launch Code 5 given to each application. Might it be possible to send this Launch Code to the app in a non-reset situation, and thus reset the app without having to reset the machine? I'm afraid I don't know the full implications for the OS... it is certainly a very unusual setup!

[alt236]

I doubt its DocsToGo.
What happens if you start the driver and not use the keyboard? Does it crash after a while?

[Dreadnought1906]

Now this is difficult to answer, because I've been using the keyboard almost constantly for the past two weeks or so. Unfortunately I have the rather awkward combination of a disability which prevents me from writing by hand very easily, and a job that requires me to write a lot while travelling from place to place.

However, I do have two points of information that might go some way to answering the question:

1. Crashes tend to be grouped during times that I'm using the keyboard a lot. I've had times where the driver has crashed several times an hour, usually when I'm sitting in a seminar taking detailed notes.

2. Crashes don't -have- to happen when I'm typing. There have been times when I've been using the keyboard uneventfully, turn off the machine for a few hours, then turn it on, check the driver, and find that it's crashed.

Putting these together, it might make sense to hypothesise that crashes are taking place at turn on or turn off, and are somehow precipitated by information being handled by the driver.

I've been trying to keep tabs on crashes today, noting carefully whether I used the keyboard in the -previous- session before the crash. However the machine is completely failing to cooperate, and hasn't crashed all day! Of course now I've said that, it will crash at an awkward time just to spite me. : )

[Dreadnought1906]

Just a follow up to this: many months later, I realised that what, reproducibly, caused the crash was the following:

When the keyboard driver is turned on, but the Z22 is turned off, press the main selector button. This displays the time and date for a few seconds.

When the Z22 is activated again, the driver will have crashed.

The driver does not crash if it is turned off at the driver level when this operation is carried out.

[DTM]

Thank you!! I just came across this thread today, but this problem was driving me wiggy for months.

A bit over a year ago, I installed NVBackup on my TX, and that "solved" the problem because I have it set to do a soft reset daily at 3:00 a.m., thereby clearing the problem when it happens. I have not really had a problem with it since then. (I use the keyboard intermittently, and don't often check the time by pressing the button, so the problem is almost certain to clear before I see it.) But I've always wondered what it took to reproduce it. I would never have come up with this!