A Few Obscure Keyboard Switch Modifications
Figure 1: Oh yeah, I meant it when I said obscure... There’s no doubt that mechanical keyboard switches have gotten increasingly better in their stock forms over the past half decade of releases. Despite switches now having tighter manufacturing tolerances, smoother factory lubing, and overall higher quality per dollar spent, aftermarket modifications of switches is still one of the most discussed topics by people freshly joining the hobby today. This hyper fixation on switch modding is due in no small part to the glut of keyboard content creators that produced videos, shorts, and all manner of content during the peak of COVID talking about the art and science behind lubing and filming for switches. For a while there, it almost seemed as if you had to have some content about lubing, filming, and/or ‘frankenswitching’ switches if you wanted to cut it as being a true keyboard content creator in the space. However, as people like this have flooded the internet with...
Oct 22, 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: