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USB keyboard/mouse not working?

Patchbox OS
#1

Hi all!

First, I am super excited about the existence of this community and all the great hardware and docs that are now available for doing audio hacking. I’m trying to make a little bass amp and effects pedal with modep + Patchbox OS + PiSound and excited it’s even vaguely possible.

Onto the problem: I tried booting my RPi 4b (8gb ram) into the Patchbox OS image. It booted, and I was able to connect to the patchbox wifi and ssh in from my laptop. But it did not recognize any USB peripherals that were attached, including my USB class-compliant keyboard and mouse. And while the ssh-over-wifi option is very cool, it automatically rules out anything that would require the Pi itself to be connected to the internet to download things. (Did I write out the ifconfig commands to connect the Pi to my home wifi and then wonder why the ssh session hung? Why yes, of course I did. :cold_face:)

I wondered if my keyboard and mouse were not actually totally compliant, needed drivers, or needed non-standard power. They’ve worked with standard Raspian in the past, but maybe they wouldn’t work with a lite, command line-only system. So I flashed “Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) Lite” onto a card and loaded it, and they worked fine. I also tried connecting them to other very-lightweight linux systems I have, and again they worked fine. I am assuming Patchbox is some modules on top of RPiOS Lite, so that it would have at least the the same driver and hardware support, but maybe that isn’t true.

Can anyone help me figure out how to debug this?

Thanks,
asolove

#2

Ok so it looks like the issue here might be this one related to the 8gb system not being supported by the current release of PatchboxOS: Patchbox Gets Corrupted on First Boot (Raspberry Pi 4 8GB)

A second question: the instructions in that thread say:

Follow the config script as usual. If you are on Patchbox , you will need to switch to a wifi network that has internet access to download updates …

But the problem is that the RPi doesn’t recognize any USB devices and therefore can only accept IO via ssh’ing in from its wifi network. Connecting it my home wifi necessarily turns off its wifi network, so I can’t see a way to actually complete these steps in order. I essentially need a way to say “turn off your wifi access point, then connect to another one, then run these shell commands even though my ssh session is dead, and then reboot”

#3

You may initiate the connection to your WiFi from within the Patchbox OS wizard - once the device turns off the hotspot, the ssh connection will get lost. If it successfully connected to your WiFi, the device will have a new IP assigned which you may use with ssh again. See https://blokas.io/patchbox-os/docs/find-the-ip-address/

#4

Oh interesting, I’ll try that. Thanks!

1 Like
#5

I also have the non-functioning USB issue on a Pi 4 8gb. I ssh’d into it and ran apt-get update & upgrade but that has not resolved the problem, am I missing a step?

#6

Yes, sudo apt install raspberrypi-kernel (see Patchbox Gets Corrupted on First Boot (Raspberry Pi 4 8GB))

1 Like
#7

Awesome, thank you! I don’t know how I missed that.