Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

It is easy use a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse with the Raspberry Pi zero 2 w, but not to the Pinephone

Last Updated on July 3, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

At 13 min. in the following video leepspvideo shows how easy it is to pair a mini Bluetooth keyboard with trackpad to a Rasbperry Pi zero 2 w with Raspberry Pi OS and use it:

And leepspvideo shows in the above video also that it is easy to pair in addition to that another Bluetooth 3 mouse next his trackpad and everything works.

Completely different is the situation with the Pinephone:

In the following example Zebulon Walton describes the same procedure with the Pinephone:

«OK, I left the bluetooth keyboard connected to the Pinephone for a full hour. It did not disconnect. A few notes:

Although the keyboard had been previously paired with the Pinephone it does not connect automatically when switched on even if you press its bluetooth button. You have to go into the Pinephone bluetooth settings and tell it to connect the keyboard.

I had the Pinephone hooked up to USB power so it did not go into sleep mode. I don’t know if the phone going to sleep would disconnect bluetooth or how badly the bluetooth connection drains the battery.

I did not actively use the keyboard during the test, I simply connected it. (I would consider actually typing on the thing for an hour to be torture.) At the end of the hour I went to use the keyboard and it worked. The keyboard had gone to sleep, however as soon as a key was pressed it was working, it did not disconnect from the Pinephone.

As previously mentioned I have not moved to Mobian trixie. I only use the Pinephone for telephone calls and that feature is working stably with bookworm so I have not risked updating. I have no idea if changes in trixie would affect this keyboard. For that matter I can’t speak for any operating system distributions working with this keyboard other than Mobian bookworm. «

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19316&page=2

If Zebulon Walton can convince you to use Mobian bookworm and his Bluetooth mini trackpad with the Pinephone and you are happy with what he showed us we can do with it, go for it and use it.

But I will rather try to use my Raspberry Pi zero 2 w with my mini Bluetooth trackpad, instead of installing Mobian bookworm on my Pinephone to do start doing Bluetooth trackpad experiments with it.