Layers

Base

AZERTY (tap on CHG_LAY)

Programmer (hold HLD_PGRM)

Colemak Programmer (while in Colemak mode, hold HLD_PGRM)

Keypad (hold HLD_KPD)

Media (hold HLD_MED)

Other (hold CHG_LAY)

Instructions

Generating keymap.c and flashing the keyboard

• Clone the repo and run make. Make sure python3 is installed.
• When prompted, put the keyboard into bootloader mode. There are several ways of doing this:
  • A button has been mapped to trigger the bootloader mode (on this config, it's CHG_LAY+top_right_key; see the BTLDR button on this layout).
  • Unplug the keyboard, press and hold CTLR+B and plug it back in.
  • If none of the above methods work, you need to short the RESET pin on the ATmega chip. See Resources. Use a clipper or a staple to connect pin 13 and 43.
• Congrats! That should be it.

How to update layers.json

• Use Keyboard Layout Editor to mimic the keyboard configuration. Note: this website doesn't seem to support quteBrowser.
• Insert a character at the bottom of the key for a normal tap and at the top for a Shift+tap.
• When finished,
  1. Copy the permalink and add it to static/layers.json under a "URL" key.
  2. Download the layout as a JSON and copy/paste it in static/layers.json under the layout key.

Tips

When hacking around, we can get a lot of keyboard-layout.json files laying around in the Downloads folder (I'm currently at 33 and counting). A quick way to parse the content of the latest downloaded file is to use this command:

xclip -selection clipboard ~/Downloads/keyboard-layout\ $(ls -lastr ~/Downloads | tail -n 3 | awk '/keyboard/ { print $11 }')

This assumes that each keyboard-layout file has the following structure: keyboard-layout (33).json (and 33 is dynamic).

How to update the list of supported keys

• Make your way around the ugly app/keycode_mapper.py.

Specificities

Shift as a dedicated layer

In this implementation, Shift is not used in a standard manner. Instead of sending a "SHIFT" message, it changes layer entirely.
On the one hand, this allows to define completely new keys. For instance, we can define a key where { is the behaviour in lowercase, and ( is the behaviour in upper case. Try finding that key on a normal keyboard,... it doesn't exist!
But on the other hand, it can also cause unexpected behaviours like:

• In software like Gimp or Google Presentations, holding Shift and clicking on multiple objects to select them all won't work. It's as is Shift is not pressed.
• If used in combination with other layers (like the PGRM layer), the keyboard can sometimes get stuck in "Shift" layer. Hitting Ctrl+w to close 1 tab in your browser will actually close the entire browser, as if Ctrl+Shift+w had been pressed.

These two things alone are fairly cumbersome so I might drop the idea of "Shift as a layer" in the future.

[WIP] "Magic key" to change between layouts

• how it works (held --> uses the "other" layer, tapped --> switch to colemak)
• how it's implemented: process_record_user. see the QMK documentation

Backlog

• Azerty on the magic key?

Resources

• Technical sheet of the ATmega32U4 chip, see page 3. The reset pin is at location 13 and a convenient GND pin is at location 43.

Dependencies (Linux)

• Sending Unicode characters requires IBus to be running on your system. Make sure it is running all the time!
• One dependency I was lacking was PyGObject (pip install PyGObject --user)
• QMK requires the installation for pycairo, for this, ensure that:
  • You have installed pkg-config.
  • You have installed cairo.