Bluetooth "mice" freeze after a few minutes of use, especially if left idle for a few moments.

[Edward Goldstick]

Hello,

I have an HP X2 Chromebook using the latest stable version of ChromeOS (soraka, version 91.13904.0) and that supports Bluetooth version 4.2.

I prefer to use a Bluetooth mouse and have been using a Jelly Comb MS003 since Dec 2018.  For the first two years it worked fine, but sometime in late 2020 it began freezing when I was using it even if it had not had time to go into sleep mode when left idle.  It became increasingly difficult to wake it up by clicking, but until recently it would start working only after removing and then reinserting the battery.  A few weeks ago even that approach would not work reliably.

One specific point that may be pertinent:  sometime in 2020 the OS began showing the battery charge remaining spontaneously when reconnecting, and it seemed like the battery drain was unrealistically pessimistic; for example, a brand new battery would show 4% of charge remaining after just a day or two of use (perhaps 4-5 hours), and the battery still showed an adequate charge on a tester.  I have not found a way to turn off the battery testing function to see if the mouse would be less likely to lose its bluetooth connection.

Also, this is a dual-mode mouse and the 2.4ghz wireless connection via a dongle and it does not have these problems.  I do not wish to use that mode both because the dongle is USB-A and X2 only has two USB-C ports; also, I need one of those ports for a charger/external display connection and the other one is left free for USB-C memory devices, etc.

I recently decided to try a different mouse (thinking this one was a 'cheap' model), so I bought a Logitech M585 that is also dual-mode.  It works longer than the MS003, but if used for 15-30 minutes and then left idle for more than a minute or two it will also freeze and not wake up when moved or clicked.  It also shows when it is reconnecting with a unrealistic decrease in the battery charge after just a day or two of normal use.

Three questions come to mind immediately:

(1) Is this an appropriate place to pose this question?  .... and if not, where would that be?

(2) Anybody else have problems with Bluetooth mice under recent versions of Chromium or ChromeOS?

(3) Is there a way to disable the battery life monitoring in Bluetooth so that I can see if it is the culprit?

Any guidance or ideas would be welcome, and I'm willing to run whatever reasonable tests might be suggested.  People on this forum were very helpful to me after I acquired this new Chromebook and discovered the touchpad and touchscreen could not be deactivated (it was both a general problem rendered a bit more delicate because the keyboard and touchpad of this device are removable but do were not considered removable devices (that change was done in the native OS after about a year of wrangling, but it was still quite pleasant to be assited.

Any ideas or guidance would be appreciated on this new problem.

Thank you,

Ed Goldstick 

[Harry Cutts]

Hi Ed,

Could you file this as a bug in our public tracker? I'd be very surprised if the battery life reporting was causing the problem, but clearly there's something going wrong here. You can use this link to create a bug in the public Bluetooth component.

Thanks,

Harry Cutts

Chrome OS Platform Input