I've had my Bangle.js 2 for about two weeks now, and it's great! Aside from occasional issues.
I thought it was general instability early on, but now I'm thinking there's likely more going on. In the last two weeks I had these problems:
Some sort of corruption where I needed to reset the bootloader. This happened in the first day or so while I was still installing and experimenting with a lot of apps, so I thought it could have been my fault somehow. I wish I remember the details more, but I think I remember it having trouble going to the clock - like the bootloader got corrupted. I do know I got the "-> Bluetooth" message and fixed it by reinstalling the default apps. Bluetooth seemed to work fine, if a little finnicky at the time - but it worked well enough to reinstall the default apps From there it worked fine.
The bluetooth quit working. Initially it mirrored this post: JS 2 BLE connection Failing but after I did a factory reset I was able to reinstall all the apps and it began working again.
At one point (I can't pin this one exactly before or after #2 - I wasn't taking detailed notes) I had it give up while installing several apps. I needed to reboot and perhaps reinstall default apps to get it back. The next time was successful. Apparently I don't give up easily, and thought this might just be rough edges on the Bangle.js. If things normally run smoother than this, I'd love to know.
Overnight it disconnected from my smartphone once... but a reboot seemed to bring it back.
Another crash or corruption. I was using the Working Memory app and it glitched - it acted like I hadn't responded to the prompt when I had. Resetting the app fixed it. This happened again later that day while I had disabled bluetooth, but then I discovered the next one:
Bluetooth appears to be totally dead. I can enable and disable it in the menu - no difference. The console flashes "-> Bluetooth" quickly as it loads (or more persistently on Clean Boot since it stays on that screen). (It also showed this message during incident #1, but during #1 bluetooth kept working, more or less ) I attempted a factory reset from the Settings menu, which appeared to successfully reset everything, but this time it did not fix the "-> Bluetooth" message nor restore bluetooth functionality. Also did a factory reset from the Reboot menu. Same result.
That's where it sits currently - factory reset but not communicating and displaying "-> Bluetooth" when it boots. I suspect at this point it's a hardware issue.
Other data points:
Crashes 1 through 4 happened while connected to my Android phone. Crash 5/6 happened while bluetooth was purposely disconnected all day.
I'm on updated firmware and latest apps as of this last week, along with 3 or so apps that got updates about a week ago. Firmware 2v24.
Test (from the reboot menu) shows sensible results for nearly everything. I'm not sure what the top "TS" item is, but that one stays red and doesn't give me enough info to judge if it's good or not.
Early on I was trying to figure out power consumption and what might affect it, so installed the Device Status Widget so I could see power status of the peripherals. A couple of days of that showed significantly more battery usage to the point I looked at it again and realized it also shows RAM and storage. My guess (without looking at code yet) is it was redrawing RAM and disk every few minutes, and that involves a power-intensive query to the storage system. Either way, removing that widget helps battery significantly!
Anecdotally, it seems to make sense that it's a storage-related hardware issue. Most of the issues happened while I was interacting with the disk, while the Device Status Widget was running, or while the Working Memory Helper was running (which I'm guessing stores results on disk as well?).
I haven't hooked any debuggers up to it, but at this point it seems like it might be the only possible next step.
Where can I go next? Might it be a hardware problem, or do we need a hex dump to confirm it?
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I've had my Bangle.js 2 for about two weeks now, and it's great! Aside from occasional issues.
I thought it was general instability early on, but now I'm thinking there's likely more going on. In the last two weeks I had these problems:
That's where it sits currently - factory reset but not communicating and displaying "-> Bluetooth" when it boots. I suspect at this point it's a hardware issue.
Other data points:
I haven't hooked any debuggers up to it, but at this point it seems like it might be the only possible next step.
Where can I go next? Might it be a hardware problem, or do we need a hex dump to confirm it?