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fn-mote

Announces != releases.

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.

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I'm cynical, too, and I have good reason to be.

I recently bought a Keychron TKL keyboard that uses Hall effect switches. It is, in my opinion, a lovely board to type on and so far I like it quite a lot. (Hopefully, this board with its socketed HE switches will serve longer than the previous board that had soldered Cherry MX Blues.)

It was advertised as being open-source and supporting QMK. Not at some time in the mysterious future, but right then. (And that's still true right now -- the web page is unchanged.)

But it does not have source available. The link for source code on the website lands at a Github page for a completely-unrelated keyboard, and I can't do anything at all with it using QMK. Extensive digging to find the source has resulted in zero positive results.

In the case of this Keychron keyboard, the promise of source code consists of resolute lies more than it does vaporware: The source is stated to openly exist, but it does not exist.

A question about this situation to their support email resulted in assignment of a ticket number, followed by silence.

So yeah, anyway: The cynicism is valid.

Well technically they sold you product that does not satisfy description, so you can claim money back even after warranty period ends (same as factory bugs/mistakes, they cannot be put under warranty period).

I've got better things to do than to die on a hill made of a corporate lie that is worth less than $100.

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 it; I'm not sure what I'm missing out on here.

> > A question about this situation to their support email resulted in assignment of a ticket number, followed by silence.

Oh, my apologies, I missed that line.

> 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 it; I'm not sure what I'm missing out on here.

I felt the same way before I started using it. Once you start though, you'll start thinking of ways to tweak it for your own workflow and pretty soon you won't be able to go without it.

One of these days, maybe I'll get an opportunity to explore it. :) I seem to be running across more people saying interesting things about QMK than I used to, but maybe some of that is just observational bias bringing it to the forefront.

If I may ask: What's good about it for your use?

Not the same user but I can chime in here. I'm mostly on a smaller split keyboard but having symbols accessible trough a layer without having to leave home row is definitely something I like to add to my keyboard configurations. That and home row modifiers or shortcuts I use often.

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.

I think I can do all of that with Keychron's webusb interface (which works fine in Chrome, including with Linux after some permissions butchering): https://launcher.keychron.com

There's quite a lot that can be done in there including some mouse functions.

After some thought, I think I'd want QMK for weirder stuff.

Maybe steal a few pins for a rotary encoder that sticks out of the side and acts as a volume knob (I really like having physical knobs for volume).

Or RGB dumb stuff: Of the built-in RGB modes, I like "heatmap" the best. Areas of the keyboard light up with progressively-warmer colors as I type, and I think that's both fun and non-distracting.

It's an HE keyboard, so it knows the linear position of all of the keys with decent resolution. If it's got enough grunt to spare, it can calculate the velocity and end-travel point of each keypress.

So lazy typing can light up with a nice cool blue-ish heatmap, and faster-but-relaxed typing can eventually progress all the way through orange and red. It does this right now with its existing mode.

But with velocity and travel added as inputs: Furious, hard, high-velocity typing that really bottoms out the keys could start off being really red straight away, even if few keys have been pressed.

Or key repeat rates: If I want any random key to repeat Really Fast or Really Slow right now, maybe that can be made to be very dynamic thing thing by pressing that key harder or softer, or even vary throughout a single keypress by looking at the key's linear position. (Maybe I should patent that one. You read it here first, Mr. Patent Examiner.)

Keychron is a real company with a good history so it isn't unreasonable to expect it and thus you shouldn't be too cynical. However don't confuse that with don't be cynical at all - many companies with a good history have canceled projects, and this is still vaporware.

Don't they already have open source firmware, at least for their keyboards. I have a K4 HE and this is on their Github [1].

[1] - https://github.com/Keychron/qmk_firmware/tree/hall_effect_pl...

They publish the .stp, .dxf, .dwg, .pdf files for a lot of their products already too.

I would be fairly optimistic that they will hold their promise.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Keychron has legitimately published the source for their QMK branches.

The real issue is that people buying a keyboard that advertises QMK support reasonably expect that they can install the upstream generic QMK, but Keychron actually maintains a bunch of "playground" branches on their fork of the QMK repository that each function as their own version of QMK.

I've been using a Q6 Pro as my primary keyboard for a while and I like it overall, but I was very disappointed when I decided to roll up my sleeves and compile QMK myself. My board launched with a build from the "bluetooth_playground" branch, which hasn't been updated for 2 years now and is now 6000 commits behind the main QMK project. There's now a separate "wireless_playground" branch which has been updated more recently and has an entry for my keyboard, but the link on the product page still goes to "bluetooth_playground" and even "wireless_playground" is 3000 commits behind the main QMK project.

Keychron boards without special functionality seem to get added to upstream QMK just fine, but a lot of us owners of bluetooth-enabled Keychron boards would really appreciate it if they provided an official way to flash normal QMK and just forgo the wireless features.

I wonder if it would be possible to get ZMK working on it instead, since that's built primarily for wireless support, and also supports wired configurations too as of recently. Seems like the STM32 that the Q6 pro uses is supported, so you might have some luck: https://zmk.dev/docs/hardware

If they plan on developing it in the open and taking early contribution / feedback could be a valid (and good) reason.

Or it's (again) a brilliant idea from those marketing people, something along the lines of "let's announce something we don't have and see how it is received, so that we will see if there is interest or not".

It's not even made up, I have seen marketing people actually do that.

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