Hello MNT Reform Next backers!

We hope you are having a happy summer (or winter) wherever you are. We’ve been busy fine-tuning the design of Reform Next before we enter full production and wanted to share a little bit of what we’ve been working on.

Improved I/O from RCORE

RCORE is our adapter board for Firefly RK3588 modules for the MNT Reform series. The new RCORE R-2 revision is finally done. Aside from minor bug fixes, a significant change is the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connector. Lukas exchanged SDIO/UART connector for PCIe and made that pinout largely compatible with the PCIe port of Raspberry Pi 5, but with some extra pins for a USB2 lane.

This means a new Wi-Fi/BT module will be available for the Reform series, which Reform Next will have out of the box, giving you the option of fast, modern WiFi 6E.

Trackpad Firmware Work

While hardware work progresses, we’ve also been improving our custom firmware for Reform Next’s peripherals. An ongoing project is the improvement of trackpad features such as scrolling. The video below shows a feature called "scrolling inertia" which provides a quick and minimum-effort scrolling experience.

Since May, a lot of progress has been made. Last month, Lukas implemented the use of multiple fingers (and pinch zooming) in the trackpad firmware, now natively in HID precision touchpad mode. GNOME automatically works well with multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger workspace switching:

For the latest progress, be sure to follow Lukas on the Fediverse!