feature-request: sending soft "Wifi-kill" keypresses upon "Wifi Privacy Switch" toggle.

[DrYak]

It would be great if, in addition of shutting down the power to the Wifi SDIO chip, the "Wifi Privacy Switch" could also send a "Wifi Soft-kill" keypress (like the "Fn" + "Wireless" key combo that brings a "select which devices to turn on or off" dialog on some Windows Laptops), so that we could trigger a rescan of the SDIO bus.

As the SDIO chip isn't plug'n'play, currently its advised in the wiki to reboot the Pinebook Pro to get Wifi working when switching it back on with the privacy switch.

There is a way to force rescan the SDIO bus, though it requires some manual fiddling on command line

It would be great if the EC could send some event when the Privacy Switch is toggled, so that some script could react on the Linux side and rescan the bus, thus removing or reenabling the Wifi whenever it is un-/re- powered by the EC.

[ayufan]

Interesting idea.

[Lady-Galadriel]

We should probably have the same concept applied to all 3 of the privacy switches. Both privacy switched on and off.

When enabling the privacy switch, send the privacy on key press first, to notify the OS. Then remove power. When disabling the privacy switch, enable the power, then send the keypress to notify the OS.

This way we can be cute when enabling the camera. Like automatically launch a video conferencing program, if we put something on the OS side. Of course, it would have to be enabled by the user, not the default OS.

[jackhumbert]

I've been messing around with custom keyboard firmware sending F13+ key taps for these events (on and off for each) that you should be able to bind to these sort of actions: https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater#revised-firmware

[DrYak]

Big up for the reverse engineering work! (I didn't understand that Pine only received the source codefor the updater tool, not the firmware itself).