Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
My success stems completely from "textonly" and "blacksunix"posts under the BM-16A drop discussions https://www.massdrop.com/buy/bm-16a-16-key-programmable-mini-pad-kit/talk/2331792 READ these. The only changes I made were to use the json layout files for the BM-16S from the Google Drive
Get: QMK Toolbox from Github, install it Get: the default JSON and instructions from manufacturer Google Drive. This is on their Aliexpress page for the BM-16A as mentioned by "jf647" here. So you can just search for it as well.
- I used https://kbfirmware.com/ to modify my layout. Upload the "BM16S.json" file from the manufacturer Google Drive pack into kbfirmware.com
- This loads the basic layout in kbfirmware.com. Customize it
- Backup your json if you wish under the Settings tab. Then go to the Compile tab and export the ".Hex" file and load it into QMK Toolbox. Make sure the right chip is correctly selected in the toolbox UI
- Connect the board to the computer. I shorted the reset pins, labeled "RE" next to the smaller of the board chips, with a pair of needle nose pliers. Definitely gonna solder and run an external switch there at some point...
- The keypad will be put into DFU mode with this reset, and will then be visible in the QMK Toolbox console. Here you can flash your custom Hex file to the board
- Unplug, replug
------------------------- Note that the Google Drive JSON can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tlTHQIFcluK2mjZ4UbbKCsdRLgSRSPw6 Here are some pics of how I shorted the terminals in the RE box: