I don’t have time to learn how to wrangle Kaleidoscope from scratch - so I’ve ported QMK to the Model 01 instead.
You can find it here on Github; assuming you have a suitable dev setup all you need to do is type make model01:avrdude and your keyboard will be programmed.
It doesn’t support fancy dancy magic prancy LED effects, and QMK doesn’t support mouse warping either. But it does keys, which is what I was after
The major driver for me was just skimming the extensive index of modules and their docs. I’m pretty short on time at the moment, and I determined it’d take me much longer to get up to speed than it would to write a port in an environment where I already know how everything works.
It only took about an hour and a half to get everything up and running. I’ve since spent longer getting it clean and tidy for upstream, of course, so maybe it wasn’t quite economical in the end. I did enjoy the process though…!
In some ways QMK is easier to get to grips with. There is a single repository which is easy to fork and modify, I’m still wrangling with multiple repositories and forks with Kaleidoscope. Also I think the tool chain suits people from a command line development background.
I’d be interested in trying to run QMK on my model01, but I’am running into a problem.
How do you program it? I’ve read the QMK documentation about setting up the build environment and installing the requirements but I can’t get avrdude to program the keyboard.
I have Arduino installed which can connect to the board just fine by pressing the prog button when uploading, but when trying to upload the QMK firmware it claims there is an error;
avrdude: error: programmer did not respond to command: leave prog mode
I even tried to use the avrdude configuration which is used by the arduino IDE, do I need to use the program button on the PCB?
The Arduino IDE resets the micro controller when it starts the flashing procedure, if you are holding the progbram button at that moment it wil enter program mode. When using avrdude it doesn’t do the reset. I had to plugin in the USB connector while holding down the prog buttone to enter program mode and then start the flashing procedure with my other keyboard before finally getting it to flash. The flashing procedure is a bit finicky when using avrdude, I had mixed results and even had some difficulty flashing back to the kaleidoscope firmware.
But now that I can compile and flash QMK, I hope to get to play with some of its feature in the upcoming weeks.
Out of curiousity, I noticed the LEDs flickering when using QMK, I read somewhere that this is due to the fact that not all of the hardware features on the Model01 are supported by QMK. Does anyone know if these features will be ported?
I believe the LED feature that is not implemented is the high speed batch update supported by the hardware. Saying that I’ve never has any issues with the LEDs flickering.
I was able to resolve the issue I mentioned above by setting [RGB_MATRIX_ENABLE = no] in [rules.mk]. It seems that the RGB effect in the QMK firmware uses too much power.