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.
I suspect that a lot of hardware will start shipping open source firmware soon. Routers, IP cameras, etc.
It'll be a selling point for everyone tinkering with vibe coding, and it's no longer a moat.
Companies that don't do this will have their firmwares dumped with open source models and tools. Companies that do this will have community goodwill and extra distribution that comes from having people talking about your product.
That might happen in niche enthusiast verticals like PC gaming. It's not going to happen in the broader market because there is no broader interest in it.
Most people want open source firmware for their router like they want open source sewing patterns for their pants. Primarily these are consumer products where people buy the product as a way to intentionally avoid spending time dealing with the problem they solve.
Open source pants might sell well in a Hobby Lobby and an open source IP camera might sell well in a Micro Center, but neither would sell well enough to get shelf space in a Walmart... and the best selling one in Walmart sells a tiny fraction compared to whoever can land an Xfinity contract.
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 source keyboard firmware is great, it's a good example of how open source is beneficial for end users, especially power users.
And, in an era where vendor software and firmware for all kinds of devices is constantly having vulnerabilities, it is possible the liability of doing custom shit will eventually outweigh whatever benefits hardware companies seem to think it has, versus just having industry standards and free software instead. But, maybe that is wishful thinking.
My only complaint with Keychron is that of 5 or so keyboards I've owned from them I wound up having to resolder 3 different hotswap sockets on 2 different keyboards right out of the box. That is... Not a fantastic failure rate. OTOH, they are otherwise an unambiguously great value, with materials and build quality that feels pretty impressive for the cost, QC issues notwithstanding.
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.
my issue with the one i have (k2, iirc) is that if i use it wirelessly and the battery dies, it becomes a brick until its been fully recharged. it won't even work as a wired keyboard until then. so ever since then i only use it wired.
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.
It’s interesting and slightly off-topic, but I’ve been a Keychron user for years (currently have their latest Q6 Ultra 8K), and I’m wondering whether I should be using QMK? I’ve never really dug into it before, but I’m afraid I’ll be losing functionality.
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 up on Ebay. Bought it 3 years ago, used for a week. QWERTY is hard to quit. I like the EPOMAKER Magicforce Smart2 68-Key layout [0] . No QMK, but I get by with Karabiner, etc.
Theres nothing about the moonlander that forces you to not be QWERTY though, and I'd bet most people are in fact on QWERTY with it.
Do you mean hard to quit staggered keyboards? As in the rows dont line up in a grid.
Personally I've been using ortholinear boards for over a decade to the point that its quite the opposite problem, it feels so unnatural to have to move your fingers in such directions.
Sometimes there is just no home row quite like a 48 key planck's.
Do you mean hard to quit staggered keyboards? As in the rows dont line up in a grid.
Perhaps. But also, during my 3-4 day infatuation phase, I spent too much time screwing around with remapping and thumb keys and layers with zero to show for it. I do not blame ortho/Moonlander/staggered, this was on me. I am a victim of having too many choices.
I only bought one keyboard from keychron and it was flaky from day one. It's the simplest keyboard they sold - wired, non hot swap. I don't know how to diagnose and fix the problem or I might try. In the end it wasn't worth $50, and you can get other Chinese mechanical keyboards for half the price with seemingly better quality control. Really can't recommend keychron
I like their products, but I recently discovered that two separate keyboards that I bought a couple of years ago are not actually hot swap despite claiming to be.
On the bright side, both demonstrated very strong solder joints when pulled on fairly aggressively.
Hopefully better than their QMK fork. They force push over their branch in their fork each new release effectively erasing history of the last version...
Of course there's no change log anywhere either...
Very interesting. I've been eyeballing a mouse/trackball project for a while based on some of the open source designs like Ploopy and the like. Slap a Nordic chip on it and a joycon battery. Even better if you can cook up a wireless charging mousepad like Logitech offers!
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.
What's wrong with the G502? I like the wired G502 pretty well. Ideally I'd tweak the shape to be a little more like the M500s shape, but I'm happy enough with it overall.
it uses this board: https://github.com/jfedor2/rp2040-pmw3360 and i can dig into my .stl files for the mouse if you want... made it on Blender and https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/beta - it's not the most lightweight thing in the world (would say around 100 grams) but it slides nicely and maybe by cycling/exercising often i don't think this one would give me RSI at any point in time... it's angle based on the most muscle neutral position the human arm anatomy has, between 20° - 30° [0] https://www.jospt.org/doi/pdf/10.2519/jospt.2004.34.10.638
I've just grabbed myself a Nape Pro trackball. It's really quite neat. ZMK firmware (which was actually the main thing I wanted) and a configurable positioning angle. I'm still getting used to it but so far it looks like a decent addition to my wireless toolkit.
I would prefer a bigger trackball as a daily driver, but it's an interesting device otherwise. It feels like they could reasonably do a mini version, too, just by chopping the non-main buttons in half. Definitely going to crack it open and see what the innards look like.
I stumbled upon this brand when I was looking for a hall effect QMK keyboard.
Glad to see them introducing this - I might make a purchase as while my current mouse is great, I can't customise it because the associated bloatware runs only on Windows.
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
I bought a Q6 wired keyboard. Most solid keyboard I've ever owned.
Only problem is the backlight didn't actually light up the keys.
It wasn't fixable. first, the keys that came with the keyboard were opaque. And after the arduous task of replacing the keys with shine-through keycaps -- all the LEDs were positioned below the keystem instead of above, so the lettering wasn't illuminated.
I would have loved to use that keyboard. Switched to steelseries apex pro.
I really wanted to like Keychron, but after spending 200$ on one of their high end keyboards, certain keys weren't detecting presses less than a month later. I couldn't end up fixing it so I tossed it out. Felt like a waste
Never have I thought "I want a mouse with modifiable firmware", IMHO this is only going to lead to more bugs arising from the associated increase in complexity and the "we can always fix it later" mentality. All the mouses and keyboards I've used have a mask-programmed MCU, and essentially no bugs to speak of.
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 descriptors or something similar.
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?
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadIt'll be a selling point for everyone tinkering with vibe coding, and it's no longer a moat.
Companies that don't do this will have their firmwares dumped with open source models and tools. Companies that do this will have community goodwill and extra distribution that comes from having people talking about your product.
Most people want open source firmware for their router like they want open source sewing patterns for their pants. Primarily these are consumer products where people buy the product as a way to intentionally avoid spending time dealing with the problem they solve.
Open source pants might sell well in a Hobby Lobby and an open source IP camera might sell well in a Micro Center, but neither would sell well enough to get shelf space in a Walmart... and the best selling one in Walmart sells a tiny fraction compared to whoever can land an Xfinity contract.
And, in an era where vendor software and firmware for all kinds of devices is constantly having vulnerabilities, it is possible the liability of doing custom shit will eventually outweigh whatever benefits hardware companies seem to think it has, versus just having industry standards and free software instead. But, maybe that is wishful thinking.
My only complaint with Keychron is that of 5 or so keyboards I've owned from them I wound up having to resolder 3 different hotswap sockets on 2 different keyboards right out of the box. That is... Not a fantastic failure rate. OTOH, they are otherwise an unambiguously great value, with materials and build quality that feels pretty impressive for the cost, QC issues notwithstanding.
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.
My Moonlander is gathering dust, can't find time to put it up on Ebay. Bought it 3 years ago, used for a week. QWERTY is hard to quit. I like the EPOMAKER Magicforce Smart2 68-Key layout [0] . No QMK, but I get by with Karabiner, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0836T2Y17
Do you mean hard to quit staggered keyboards? As in the rows dont line up in a grid.
Personally I've been using ortholinear boards for over a decade to the point that its quite the opposite problem, it feels so unnatural to have to move your fingers in such directions. Sometimes there is just no home row quite like a 48 key planck's.
Perhaps. But also, during my 3-4 day infatuation phase, I spent too much time screwing around with remapping and thumb keys and layers with zero to show for it. I do not blame ortho/Moonlander/staggered, this was on me. I am a victim of having too many choices.
On the bright side, both demonstrated very strong solder joints when pulled on fairly aggressively.
Of course there's no change log anywhere either...
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.
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.
What's wrong with the G502? I like the wired G502 pretty well. Ideally I'd tweak the shape to be a little more like the M500s shape, but I'm happy enough with it overall.
it uses this board: https://github.com/jfedor2/rp2040-pmw3360 and i can dig into my .stl files for the mouse if you want... made it on Blender and https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/beta - it's not the most lightweight thing in the world (would say around 100 grams) but it slides nicely and maybe by cycling/exercising often i don't think this one would give me RSI at any point in time... it's angle based on the most muscle neutral position the human arm anatomy has, between 20° - 30° [0] https://www.jospt.org/doi/pdf/10.2519/jospt.2004.34.10.638
I would prefer a bigger trackball as a daily driver, but it's an interesting device otherwise. It feels like they could reasonably do a mini version, too, just by chopping the non-main buttons in half. Definitely going to crack it open and see what the innards look like.
https://keychron.com.au/collections/mouse/products/keychron-...
Glad to see them introducing this - I might make a purchase as while my current mouse is great, I can't customise it because the associated bloatware runs only on Windows.
They claim 2027 Q1 will be the release date.
Links below purporting to be “the repository” lead to a repo with no source code.
Sorry, I’m cynical. An announcement 6-9 months ahead of release? Why? Right now it’s vaporware.
Only problem is the backlight didn't actually light up the keys.
It wasn't fixable. first, the keys that came with the keyboard were opaque. And after the arduous task of replacing the keys with shine-through keycaps -- all the LEDs were positioned below the keystem instead of above, so the lettering wasn't illuminated.
I would have loved to use that keyboard. Switched to steelseries apex pro.
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 descriptors or something similar.