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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Is is really handy if you have a programmable keyboard that use a web configurator/firmware builder. E.g. ZSA's Oryx. Downloading the firmware and then flashing with another program gets old pretty quickly.

That said, I don't really like the browser having USB access, etc. I agree that the potential privacy/security issues are not worth the comfort it provides.

(Yes, I know you can script your way around it by monitoring a download directory, etc.)

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> Is is really handy if you have a programmable keyboard that use a web configurator/firmware builder. E.g. ZSA's Oryx. Downloading the firmware and then flashing with another program gets old pretty quickly.

I have five of those keyboards, and I haven't flashed them in years. "Downloading the firmware and then flashing with another program gets old" yes, but you don't deal with it every day? or even every month?

Flashing every day isn’t too uncommon if you’re often changing the key map, macros, and other configuration. I probably flashed my QMK keyboard an average of 10 times per day for the first week, and then that tapered off to once or twice a day for a while.

I sure hope you're aware that you're not the typical browser user.

Could you explain why are you flashing your keyboard so often? I have QMK keyboard, and I never felt like I’m missing anything by using it as is out of box. It also has a hardware switch for Mac/PC layouts, which is the only feature I could imagine having to flash it for, if that wasn’t available

Changing the layout of key map layers for convenience, and macros, back when I assembled my first QMK keyboard. Haven’t touched it in years now, though.

> Flashing every day isn’t too uncommon if you’re often changing the key map, macros, and other configuration

That sounds like a failure in design of the keyboard and/or your own personal use case instead of the designed-for use case.

I doubt you have this same sentiment about continuous integration in the context of work. Same concept. Eventually you get every thing dialed in and you keep it there.

It's gotten a lot easier than it used to be. The Glove80 is configured by downloading a firmware file and dropping it into a mounted folder. That's not very onerous at all.

That sounds terrible to me. Can you also load your old file back into the app, say, if you want to check what the existing key mappings are? Still, I don't see the point of jumping through those hoops when WebUSB isn't something that automatically happens without the user explicitly granting access to a specific device in a dialog. People are acting like a Facebook ad can just enumerate all your USB devices and turn on your microphone or something.

This problem has been mostly fixed by newer keyboard adopting UF2: the bootloader presents itself as a USB flash drive, so uploading new firmware to your keyboard is literally a drag-and-drop.

The only drawback is that it is a little bit of a hassle if you're the type of person who changes out their macros every single day. But then again, if you need it that frequently installing the configurator tool locally isn't a huge deal I guess.

> if you need it that frequently installing the configurator tool locally isn't a huge deal I guess.

This sucks because the manufacturer has to forever keep supporting multiple native apps (given that mech keyboard users are pretty technical, not just Win/Mac but also Linux are necessary). Mac OS in particular is an insane moving target, and they tend to completely break app compatibility with every single major release.

What ends up happening is they'll ship JUST a program for Windows and shrug at everybody else.

Isn't it less of a hassle, because you can just save multiple configurations and just upload the configuration you want to use now?

Is LVFS not available for these devices? Sounds like it would be a better fit. https://fwupd.org/

The problem is that these firmware images are user-specific. Think of ergonomic keyboards[0], with a lot of dual-use keys, key combinations, macros, and layouts tailored to the user's intended use case. The configuration is baked into the firmware itself, so you can't just serve a single firmware image to everyone via LVFS.

[0]: https://www.zsa.io/voyager , for example

Hmm, that's a poor design. Firmware should be separate from its configuration.

In general, I don't want my browser to have direct usb access, but ZSA Oryx is the one place I'm annoyed by Firefox not supporting it. Honestly, I'd prefer having a native desktop app to configure my keyboard. But for my ZSA keyboard, I haven't found something as good as the web app for linux.

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