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
It took me a while to figure out programming with TMK. I wasn't able to get the code from https://github.com/jichuntao/tmk_keyboard to compile, but using the main TMK source for the GH60 with the matrix file for the KC60 seemed to work. I'm still playing around with layouts, but I love the programming ability on this thing and spacefn works much better in hardware than with software.
I made a basic Ubuntu VM with VirtualBox. I started with a command line only server install but quickly realized that I like having a graphical interface so I installed LUbuntu. I'm not sure what all I installed. Maybe just git dfu-util and dfu-programmer? `sudo apt-get install -y git dfu-util dfu-programmer`
I think the url's will get moved to the bottom of the message, so this will probably be pretty ugly.
You should be able to run `git clone ` and then the tmk url below to clone the main tmk source locally. I replaced the /tmk_keyboard/keyboard/gh60/matrix.c file with the matrix.c file linked below. You can use or modify any of the existing keymap_ files in that /gh60 folder to start with or create your own. The keymap_kc60.c file below is what I'm using. It's a work in progress and pretty ugly but it works.
To program the board push the button on the bottom to put it into programming mode. It should show up with the Atmel controller name in this mode. Right click the USB icon at the bottom of the VirtualBox window and click the Atmel device to pass it through to the VM.
In your terminal you'll want to go to the tmk_keyboard/keyboard/gh60/ folder and use the following:
sudo make KEYMAP=keymapfile clean sudo make KEYMAP=keymapfile dfu
Where keymapfile is the name of the keymap file you want to use. In this case I'd use `kc60` If all goes well it should build the firmware, flash it, and reset the keyboard so it's ready to use.
I can't stress enough that I'm learning this as I go. I'm a complete novice with both linux and programming so the above is probably worth what you paid for it. :)
https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard https://github.com/jichuntao/tmk_keyboard/blob/master/keyboard/kc60/matrix.c https://github.com/GorillaDiapers/tmk_keyboard/blob/master/keyboard/gh60/keymap_kc60.c