SA in 2024: Where does the high-profile king stand in the modern keyboard hobby?
In early 2021, I only had eyes for SA Godspeed. Raised in Florida across the bay from Cape Canaveral, I grew up watching space shuttle launches, and my dad’s life-long obsession with NASA, space and sci-fi quickly spread to me. At 27, I was introduced to Neil Armstrong, a personal hero, and was able to tell him the impact he had on me and my family. So on that fateful spring day when I walked into my IT department and told my coworkers that I was thinking of getting into mechanical keyboards, the first set I wanted to own was Godspeed. It took awhile, and I mean awhile for me to accumulate all the different versions of that set. It has three alphas (Solar, Lunar and Supernova), a few full alternates (Mito & Genespeed) and several alternate modifier sets including the transcendent Ares colorway. But several hundred dollars, and many months later, I had constructed a few keyboards all equipped with different versions of SA Godspeed. I made an Earth keyboard, a Mars, an Asteroid, a...
Feb 21, 2024
I'm used to paying $350+ for custom aluminum keyboards, but was totally shocked when I received my $160 KDB75. The keyboard was packaged extremely well and arrived from China with no flaws, and weighted far more than I was expecting. It weighs more than my RS96. I never was really into the 75% layout, but I was never into the 96 key layout until I tried it, so I figured I'd give it a try since the price was definitely right.
But enough of the "review" part, lets get on to programming this guy. I always like to do guides because I know that being intimidated by programming a custom can often lead to people skipping buys they would otherwise join. This is a very easy one to program, so nothing to be afraid of here!
The first step is to simply download the Bootmapper client found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3bn9flirkb49ahz/BootMapperClient.zip?dl=0
After downloading it and running the .exe (I'm on Windows, there is an OSX version as well) you should see something like this:
Once this is active you will press the key you want to remap, and it should get highlighted in red within the matrix. Simply click on the key you want to change it to from the selection of keys at the bottom. It should look like this, using Caps Lock as an example:
One more very important thing to point out is lighting controls. You will probably want to put these on the normal FN layer. RGB mode controls the SMDs on the PCB for underglow, and LED mode, LED BrUp, LED BrDN only affect in switch LEDs. the LED on/off affects both.
Moving on to lighting!
To access the lighting features (both under PCB SMDs and in-switch LED's) go to Options from the main tab selection. You should see this screen:
Now lets head back to the main tab to flash the new layout to the keyboard. Make sure "ps2avrGB & ps2avrGB_split" is selected as the target: