Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice • Hacker News Board

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#121

Post by unbolted3032 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:01 AM UTC

I bought two (identical) of these keyboards and they're by far the worst keyboard I've ever purchased. OOB, both had Bluetooth stability issues, dropping out at least 1-2 times a day, resulting in a sustained keypress being interpreted by the OS while they reconnectedddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd.

Vendor support suggested upgrading the firmware (I was on the latest firmware) so I followed their instruction - which nuked the keyboard's ability to use Bluetooth at all. No refund or replacement offered by vendor after reporting this.

I still use the non-broken one, exclusively in wired mode, and EVERY single time I use it, I have to perform the factory reset (Fn + z + j) in order to get the lights to work. Otherwise, cycling through the presets simply dims them until they're not visible.

I'm yet to find anybody with the same problems as me.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#122

Post by ssl-3 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

squigz wrote: post #116

ssl-3 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm cynical, too, and I have good reason to be. I recently bought a Keychron TKL keyboard that uses Hall effect switches. It is, in my opinion, a lovely board to type on and so far I like it quite a lot. (Hopefully, this board with its socketed HE switches will serve longer than the previous board that had soldered Cherry MX Blues.) It was advertised as being open-source and supporting QMK. Not at some time in the my…

Did you try contacting them and asking them about it?

Yes.

> A question about this situation to their support email resulted in assignment of a ticket number, followed by silence.

It's annoying, but it's not the end of the world.

I don't even really know what I'd do with QMK if I could use it. This is the first keyboard I've owned that was advertised to support QMK and I was kind of hoping to learn more about the kinds of clever things that can (and cannot) be done with it; I'm not sure what I'm missing out on here.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#123

Post by squigz » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:17 AM UTC

ssl-3 wrote: post #122

squigz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try contacting them and asking them about it?

Yes. > A question about this situation to their support email resulted in assignment of a ticket number, followed by silence. It's annoying, but it's not the end of the world. I don't even really know what I'd do with QMK if I could use it. This is the first keyboard I've owned that was advertised to support QMK and I was kind of hoping to learn more about the kinds of clever things that can (and cannot) be done with…

> > A question about this situation to their support email resulted in assignment of a ticket number, followed by silence.

Oh, my apologies, I missed that line.

> I don't even really know what I'd do with QMK if I could use it. This is the first keyboard I've owned that was advertised to support QMK and I was kind of hoping to learn more about the kinds of clever things that can (and cannot) be done with it; I'm not sure what I'm missing out on here.

I felt the same way before I started using it. Once you start though, you'll start thinking of ways to tweak it for your own workflow and pretty soon you won't be able to go without it.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#124

Post by gausswho » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #120

stasomatic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Keychron is a meme brand surfing on the long tail of custom drops. I have a couple of them a Q1 Pro something, a K* whatever. They are just decent keyboards, a middle of the road. The constant accidental invocation of flashing lights is annoying and then you have to cycle through the presets. Not unique enough for geeks. Their marketing is good. My Moonlander is gathering dust, can't find time to put it…

You can disable the invocation of the lights. Fn + L + Light button for 6 seconds for the K series. YMMV depending on the exact model. https://keychronsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052... Their low profile keyboards are unmatched IMHO. Nothing has hit the balance that they have.

approaches manaskarekar with slow deliberate steps

stands before manaskarekar

clasps manaskarekar upon both shoulders

gazes into manaskarekar

softly smiles and subtly nods at manaskarekar

releases clasp and worm-dances back into the desert

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#125

Post by zakisaad » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:03 AM UTC

martinjc wrote: post #26

jchw wrote: post #8

A bit ago I accidentally bought a Keychron keyboard that didn't have QMK support, but then found that someone had ported it anyway, and I was able to flash it and fix some problems I had (the main one being that it seems like the default firmware only scans a single row of keys while asleep, possibly to save energy, but I want any keypress to wake the computer.) Maybe it's not perfect, but the community around open s…

I bought a K4 Nordic version, only to learn none of their software supports it. So i can't reconfigure the firmware. The keyboard has swapped Super/Alt (Windows/Alt) on the windows layout which is so annoying. I hate spending money on hardware so i'm living with it, but i curse the engineer that burned the prom every day.

> I hate spending money on hardware so i'm living with it

This is an odd take to me, as personally I'd be more willing to spend money on well designed and made hardware, than most software.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#126

Post by glitchc » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:03 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #34

jerlam wrote: post #16

This would be more exciting if Keychron had mice of more interesting / experimental form factors and functionality. Just like their keyboards, their mice are mostly differentiated by obscure technical features (polling rates!). I'm a bit worried that a decent, modern replacement for the extremely obsolete multi-button mouse I have now (Logitech G602) will never be available.

My G602 died due to Logitech's infamous double-click issue. :( I've been fine with the G502 X Lightspeed (which should avoid said double-click issue due to optical switches) and some more efficient button use to compensate for the fewer side buttons.

You can replace the switch, it's a pretty simple solder replacement, just a couple of pins. I did that for my G300s.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#127

Post by LittleLily » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

thomaslord wrote: post #108

HDBaseT wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they already have open source firmware, at least for their keyboards. I have a K4 HE and this is on their Github [1]. [1] - https://github.com/Keychron/qmk_firmware/tree/hall_effect_pl... They publish the .stp, .dxf, .dwg, .pdf files for a lot of their products already too. I would be fairly optimistic that they will hold their promise.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Keychron has legitimately published the source for their QMK branches. The real issue is that people buying a keyboard that advertises QMK support reasonably expect that they can install the upstream generic QMK, but Keychron actually maintains a bunch of "playground" branches on their fork of the QMK repository that each function as their own version of QMK. I've been using a Q6 Pro as my prima…

I wonder if it would be possible to get ZMK working on it instead, since that's built primarily for wireless support, and also supports wired configurations too as of recently. Seems like the STM32 that the Q6 pro uses is supported, so you might have some luck: https://zmk.dev/docs/hardware

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#128

Post by rincebrain » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:17 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #107

rincebrain wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is less to add features and more to lower the barrier to entry for people making mice, since, as you said, in large part keyboards and mice are appliances to the degree that it should rapidly converge to a stable set of features. Plus, on a human level, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams working on mouse development were annoyed they couldn't show their past work in the same way...

to lower the barrier to entry for people making mice The barrier is absolutely not firmware; you can get a single-chip sensor with a USB + PS/2 interface for cheap, no firmware required, and it's just plug-and-play on any PC. The mechanical design is the biggest hurdle. https://github.com/RandomDelta6/USB-Mouse

I would imagine that it's plug and play until you start adding nonsense like customizable scripting on buttons or more than a certain button count as is standard on specialized gamer mice, but sure, fair enough.

"This is a platform you can build on", software and hardware specs included, is still a much nicer thing to iterate on than "it's commodity parts to slap together" for someone without familiarity with the processes involved at scale, and going from "this is an opaque piece of hardware that responds on guaranteed timing" to "this responds on guaranteed timing but also has more complex features" is still a substantial jump, since "building software that meets realtime timing requirements" is not a thing in a lot of people's wheelhouse.

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#129

Post by JLO64 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:30 AM UTC

abhinavk wrote: post #71

JLO64 wrote: post #2

I’ve had positive experiences with Keychron products in the past, but I’ve moved past them as I now prefer orthogonal layouts. That said, I loved their support of QMK on my Q1 Pro and I really hope this ends up on that same level.

Do you mean really ortholinears like Planck or columnars like Corne, Sofle, Kinesis?

My bad, I did mean "ortholinear"!

Re: Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

#130

Post by d_tr » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:32 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #85

jchw wrote: post #8

A bit ago I accidentally bought a Keychron keyboard that didn't have QMK support, but then found that someone had ported it anyway, and I was able to flash it and fix some problems I had (the main one being that it seems like the default firmware only scans a single row of keys while asleep, possibly to save energy, but I want any keypress to wake the computer.) Maybe it's not perfect, but the community around open s…

My only complaint is that the backlight behavior has like a dozen different settings, none of which are "off". There's "on", "flicker", "blink when you hit the key", "ripple out when you hit the key", "move in waves regardless of input", etc., but there's no "don't be light" option.

I got a c3 pro a few weeks ago and you definitely can turn the lighting off. Don't remember whether it was through cycling or some other combo but you can. Did you look at the manual?