I have bought this programmable keyboard sometime in March this year. When it arrived, the whole bag was full of parts.
The Bag of Parts
Someone has designed the keyboard which uses a few layers of laser cut acrylic to house a single PCB. The whole system was held together with 6 heat-set screws (but they were not melted into the acrylic). Although the Keyboard was shipped in a protective bag and its own box, most of they keys fell out when I opened it. Then I realised that these are inter-changeable keyboard switches (hot swaps). So, after some re-assembling, these silent and clickless switches are kinda cool. I was thinking of switching them to the ones with tactile feedback (ie clickety-click).
There are other combinations to this Series and I chose the one that I can thumb at the larger dial for zooming functions. On the surface, the Keyboard has a total of 12 keys and three rotary dials. But with a press of a switch, you can switch up to three ‘layers’ of keyboard layout. The keyboard can be connected via Bluetooth 5.0 or, more importantly, with a USB-C cable( this is important when you need to program it later). Still, I am not going to switch layers as the switch is quite hard. Moreover, I have labeled the switches.
Programming
Granted that this is a programmable macro keyboard, you really need that USB-C cable to program those macros. I could not locate any software from the seller’s page but thanks to the Internet, after searching it at AliExpress, there was a link in the comments for the download. Seems like that are using Sikai technology and I the model I had is very similar to their 9 Key + 3 Knob model. If it wasn’t for the Website, I would think the concept was liberated from a crowd-funding platform.
The software is quite easy and straight-forward once you overcome the initial stumbling steps. You can enter the commands for each macro key-press and the corresponding LED will light up with the programmed colour. Do note that although the RGB LED has 7 colours and 6 lighting effects, there is no setting that allows you have an a different light colour for individual key-press.
The link above provided two versions of the software and although similar, they both have the same issue where I cannot backtrack to determine the current commands assigned to each key and their status. So, yeah, in the end, I have to rely on the good ol’ pen & paper.
Now I can use the two keys. The configuration here is based on my using of the EaglePCB software. The shortcut commands were Function F keys and so, rather than hovering over the keyboard, I used the macro keyboards instead.
