Jesse's current Keyboardio Engineering priorities

I’m posting this to give y’all some visibility into what’s keeping me up at night and to help me keep on task. There’s a lot that both Kaia and I are working on that isn’t code or support. On top of that, there are a bunch of engineering tasks that aren’t on this list. We’re not yet publishing those in an easy to read roadmap, though we do hope to get there. None of that will appear on this list. It’s also worth noting that only @kaia and I are employed by Keyboardio. If anybody else is helping you out with an issue or working on a problem, they’re doing it because they’re a nice, generous person, not because they’re obligated to.

I’m not sure this plan is going to work out, but I’m going to try to track the things at the top of my personal (aka the “official”, corporate) engineering todo list. This is an experiment. I may change the rules or delete the thread without notice.

While I’m happy to take private feedback (via personal message or email to jesse@keyboard.io) on my engineering priorities, this thread isn’t the right place to ask me to change my priorities or to advocate for issues you believe to be more important than the stuff at the top of my list.

If you’re having trouble with your Model 01 and haven’t been able to get the help you need on this community site, please drop us a line at help@keyboard.io. If you believe you’ve found an issue with the firmware and are comfortable using GitHub to report bugs, I’d love it if you could report it at https://github.com/keyboardio/Kaleidoscope/issues (or the relevant bug tracker for the plugin with which you are having issues.) If, for any reason, opening an issue on GitHub isn’t easy for you, please create a new thread on this site.

With all of that out of the way, here’s what is at the top of my engineering and support todo list, in roughly the order I intend to tackle things.

  • Build and document suitable Windows 7/Windows 8 COM port driver configurations.
    Status: built something. @rumpel tells me it’s not behaving yet.

  • Update linux setup instructions to make people install the udev rules, probably adding a script to do it for them.
    Status: started to refactor the linux build tools to use udev to detect the keyboard’s location. This will give me the hooks to do this

  • Update Model01-Firmware README to recommend the Arduino Boards Manager version of things

  • Figure out at least an interim solution for our numpad issue. (Sometimes, the Numpad shows shifted symbols rather than the numpad symbols)

  • Figure out a better solution for serial port detection for kaleidoscope builder for Linux
    Status: preliminary, hacky implementation works

  • Figure out a better solution for serial port detection for kaleidoscope builder for macOS
    Status: I know what I need to do. Just gotta do it.

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