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Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice

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

#141

Post by hack1312 »

CobaltFire wrote: post #111
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 sound like me. Same gripe about my Keychron, same Moonlander gathering dust that I keep meaning to do something with...

I mentioned it to the person you’re replying to but if you’re in the USA and considering. in offloading the Moonlander I’m interested. My email is available in my profile.

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

#142

Post by ssl-3 »

jeddy3 wrote: post #96
deepthaw wrote: post #90

It took me three hours to figure out how to blacklist my Keychron keyboard from showing up as a joystick - and screwing up several games that thought they were receiving constant joystick input - in Linux, so I'm not sure how keen I am on using their stuff in the future. Is that a common issue in Linux?

I can at least say that it's not endemic. I have two different Keychron keyboards, used in different Linux distros. I have never experienced, and wouldn't even had imagined, such a scenario.

I can imagine it very easily, depending on the keyboard.

For example: The Keychron C3 HE I'm typing this on (which I ranted elsehere about lacking the open-source/QMK firmware it is advertised to have) has some peculiar features that it supports. The way they used Hall effect keyswitches lets some fun stuff happen.

That fun stuff includes 3 different modes: One is just a keyboard, and the other two modes let the keyboard behave exactly like a game controller. At least one of those game controller modes even lets keys behave as analog inputs.

I haven't knowingly used this keyboard in game controller mode, but perhaps it is something can be selected by software (in addition to the multi-key combo listed in the book).

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

#143

Post by justsomehnguy »

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…

Remap Shift to CapsLock or whatever. I also have full mouse controls on the right side which is a gimmick but comes handy once in a while.

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

#144

Post by wongogue »

stasomatic wrote: post #106
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 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…

I also realised that qwerty will always be required. So I use colemak-dhm on split-columnar-blank-keycap keyboards with less keys and qwerty on unibody-rowstaggered-printed-keycap full-size keyboards. It helps my brain to switch.

It is very similar to using both bikes, ebikes and motorcycles all having different controls. Your brain can have different muscle memory if it thinks of them as different things.

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

#145

Post by fc417fc802 »

exidex wrote: post #12
DemiGuru wrote: post #6

For those that are interested: - https://github.com/Keychron/zgm - https://zgm.gg/

Um, did they announce opensource firmware without providing the source?

Well some of their keyboards also hypothetically have open source firmware yet upon introducing a hardware revision they never released the necessary files. I only know this because I actually wanted to purchase one of those keyboards specifically for the open firmware.

They still seem to be the best (approximately only) game in town if you want the ability to flash your own firmware to a standard off the shelf peripheral.

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

#146

Post by wongogue »

MayeulC wrote: post #74

Hmm, I have a mouse and trackballs from ploopy, they run QMK, so why was a new project needed? What is the added value? To me, the missing feature in the QMK ecosystem is a devices too device communication channel. For now there is only caps lock & others: it would be nice to activate a mouse layer (for instance: increase DPI) to a keyboard key. It is probably solvable if a heavyweight was to push for new HID descrip…

Has anyone hacked a scroll-lock based signalling solution for this.

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

#148

Post by fragmede »

aprilnya wrote: post #138
theGeatZhopa wrote: post #31

Hmm that opens up a way for cheating in games - have a Screengraber and image processing running directly communicate with mouse and let it calculate the distance to region of interest internally and then give out delta position. For the system, it looks like the mouse has been moved very fast and far

Sorry, how does new mouse firmware open this up...? USB/HID is a standard that anyone can implement, right? Is it that hard to implement a HID mouse emulator?

it's hard enough that someone else having done and open-sourcing makes it easier for anyone else that wants it. It means you don't have to do that work.

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

#150

Post by supriyo-biswas »

burner420042 wrote: post #149

The number of buttons on ergonomic mice is excessive. More than 3 is too much. So I'm sitting there wondering what else you could use them for: a random squiggler to keep the mouse moving and your monitor active when you want a break.

I had a Logitech ergonomic mouse and by default, the two extra buttons corresponded to forward/back, and I had gotten quite used to them for navigating codebases. It's a shame the mouse didn't last long, though...

As for the squiggler, put a wrist watch or something underneath it?

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