Moment of silence for all my projects…

[__red__]

The freaking PSoC board used by DMA's Common Sense project is 20+ weeks backordered and I can't find them *anywhere*.

Sorry, I just needed to vent around those who would understand.

[JP!]

The world has changed in so many ways in the last 2-3 years or whatever and I'm not very optimistic towards the future with the state of world events.

[Muirium]

Hey, look on the bright side: at least no one’s worried about global warming any more. Environmentalism was such a drag!

[Sheepless]

Wondering whether I could build a small fallout shelter out of my keyboards.

[__red__]

My God.

I walk away for a few years and people here have decided to observe reality?

I have failed.

I guess I could look at using xwhatsit, but that would mean having to actually design an electronically symmetrical board.

*eyes up his pile of PIIs in the corner of the room*

I wonder...

[DMA]

What? Really? Good thing I have ~3 spare, should last me 10 years or so at current consumption rate.

(I noticed a spike in repo clones and visits, and it looks like this post is a reason )

[__red__]

Good to see you again, how you been?

[DMA]

Working, trying to sleep.

Bought a truckload of tek scopes from a guy in Alabama last July - yet to power on a single one (literally truckload. 27 7xx4 mainframes - including 7854, 7912AD, 6-ish TM50[346], 50+(Probably 100+ - yet to count) plugins - including 3 7D01s and ~3 spectrum analyzers - plus couple big boxes of parts, big box of manuals and 2-ish carts).

Probably a year since last time I soldered anything.

Ah, also got a 4-1300MHz network analyzer and two 6.5 digit voltmeters (one working!) for $50 on estate sale. So, theoretically, I can now design BLE stuff in not a completely blind way.
Just need to somehow work less.

PS: Oh, and a reflow oven That one even comes with some tin balls, so I can now even solder BGAs, should the need arise.

[DMA]

..also.. so you can't find any -058 kits. What _could_ you find? Isn't chip shortage universal?

[Muirium]

Universal? Nope. I've got my sights on this one for my next project:

https://mechboards.co.uk/products/nice-nano-v2

No stock problem there. Some things seem unaffected. It's a complex world.

[DMA]

What about something less overpriced?

[DMA]

..actually, for BLE _plus_ USB $25 isn't bad.

One thing keeps puzzling me though: It's 2022. ZMK! BlueMicro! And yet you must still flash keymaps into the firmware, like a prehistoric caveman.
Are firmware developers idiots or do they just hate their users?

[DMA]

..too bad nRF52840 only has 8 ADC channels. This means only 4 sense channels, because ADC sampling capacitor needs to be discharged after every measurement and ADC channels are nailed down in NRF

[Muirium]

Are firmware developers idiots or do they just hate their users?

We're the idiots, clearly, and so we love them!

[mmm]

One thing keeps puzzling me though: It's 2022. ZMK! BlueMicro! And yet you must still flash keymaps into the firmware, like a prehistoric caveman.
Are firmware developers idiots or do they just hate their users?

Out of curiosity, what would better ways of managing the keymap be? An uncompiled keymap file that the firmware could parse? I've been so accustomed to flashing firmware that it hadn't even occurred to me that another way might've been possible.

..too bad nRF52840 only has 8 ADC channels. This means only 4 sense channels, because ADC sampling capacitor needs to be discharged after every measurement and ADC channels are nailed down in NRF

Why is this bad? I understand some of these words.

[DMA]

Out of curiosity, what would better ways of managing the keymap be? An uncompiled keymap file that the firmware could parse? I've been so accustomed to flashing firmware that it hadn't even occurred to me that another way might've been possible.

Hostside utility. You open the layout config page, press a button on your new keyboard, and utility highlights what you pressed and changes focus to that dropdown. And then you can either select a key from dropdown (although 255-item dropdown can be considered "cruel and unusual" by some) OR you press a key on your _old_ keyboard - which only works flawlessly on alnum keys, but since majority of your keys are alnum, it works surprisingly well.
Yes, if you know your matrix by heart, it's not that big of a deal. But the problem is nobody does. Look around DT, see how much time people spend mapping matrices. All that is monkey business caused by current firmware limitations, it's not needed.

Why is this bad? I understand some of these words.

The closer your matrix is to square - the less pins you need.
And less sense lines (heretoforth "rows") mean two things: more complicated PCB routing (not that big of a deal usually, but mismatch between physical and logical matrix dimensions can lead to pretty hilarious routing, see Cortron 80-551101 for a good example) and slower scans: for capacitive matrix you need a delay between driving a column and start of reading - you can decrease it somewhat by decreasing column resistors, but if you ever overdrive _any_ of your columns, you'll fuck up _all_ the readouts - with a chance of fucking up the next row readout, too (and that's the main reason why xwhatsit is so finicky, btw).

[Muirium]

@mmm: There's quite a lot of posts on DT by folk using VIA and VIAL. They're the apps people use for live-configuring keyboards with compatible firmwares. I must admit I loathe both pieces of software, myself. They're far too large for what they are and their interfaces are both very ugly, in many quite delightful ways. I ditched them on my Kishsaver and Beamspring, preferring the stone age route DMA dislikes so! Hey, a web editor and a hex file I can understand.

I'm not against the concept of a local app. I'm just yet to see it implemented well. Xwhatsit's GUI was… interesting. A real son of a bitch to ever run without crashing at launch on the Mac—and now completely broken as it's 32-bit only and unmaintained—but its visual design was part genius. Part something else as well, but!

[DMA]

Mu, I notice how you avoid comments on FC. Is it because you don't want to say anything bad about it in a post where I'm actively participating, or you just haven't seen it?

The hex editing part is just an above-water part of the iceberg. The underwater part is to understand what to write there - scancodes, matrix positions.. FC was created out of necessity - with capsense, you need to set thresholds for like 80+ keys, and I had no idea what those will be or how bad they will drift (turned out there's no drift - in my 3 years at facebook, I had to run FC twice to adjust thresholds, and those adjustments turned out to be caused by breadcrumb falling under the flipper!)

[Muirium]

Ain’t used it. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it is no longer called Common Sense. That is what you’re talking about, right? Hopefully I’m not confusing two different things!

I remember looking into Common Sense back in the day, but I found that my common sense was insufficient to make head nor tails of the thing. I stared at various open tabs about the hardware and the programming thereof, and got a headache. So no, I never even touched it.

See, one thing Xwhatsit was especially good at: You paid him money and he shipped you a thing that you put into your keyboard! Did like that actually. Same with Hasu. Easier to understand for us end-user class proles.

[__red__]

All the projects I've done are really personal projects that I've opened up to other people and made available. I have no interest in fabbing, building, shipping, and selling so I don't do it.

I'll help anyone that asks for help, but Open Source isn't my job.

[Muirium]

All the projects I've done are really personal projects that I've opened up to other people and made available. I have no interest in fabbing, building, shipping, and selling so I don't do it.

Very understandable. But that whole service—buying it ready made—is what draws people (clearly drooling morons) like me to buy (shitty, sadistic, user-hating) controllers with firmwares we have to flash a few times till we find our ideal layout once we've popped the thing inside our keyboard… all without teaching ourselves electrical engineering. We love it! Because we'd never get it done otherwise.

The most technical I've really gotten is mapping out matrices (which I actually find quite fun, laugh at me as you like!) and installing a Teensy with Soarer's keyboard controller on it, and indeed hand wiring my own matrix on homebuilds with the same. I don't find rows and columns intimidating at all, but fucking around in source code and even understanding anything more complicated on the hardware front than: solder these pins and flash the hex file over USB, well that's where I yelp for halp and give up before I even buy any components.

There's a human component in the system diagram, that's what I'm saying. And it defines what things hurt.

[mmm]

Hostside utility. You open the layout config page, press a button on your new keyboard, and utility highlights what you pressed and changes focus to that dropdown. And then you can either select a key from dropdown (although 255-item dropdown can be considered "cruel and unusual" by some) OR you press a key on your _old_ keyboard - which only works flawlessly on alnum keys, but since majority of your keys are alnum, it works surprisingly well.
Yes, if you know your matrix by heart, it's not that big of a deal. But the problem is nobody does. Look around DT, see how much time people spend mapping matrices. All that is monkey business caused by current firmware limitations, it's not needed.

That definitely would've made mapping a new matrix a whole lot easier. I think they're also doing some work on a GUI editor, but not sure how comprehensible it is. I enjoy text-editor editing, but I may be the minority here But i agree that ZMK can seem a bit scary in some regards.

Why is this bad? I understand some of these words.

The closer your matrix is to square - the less pins you need.
And less sense lines (heretoforth "rows") mean two things: more complicated PCB routing (not that big of a deal usually, but mismatch between physical and logical matrix dimensions can lead to pretty hilarious routing, see Cortron 80-551101 for a good example) and slower scans: for capacitive matrix you need a delay between driving a column and start of reading - you can decrease it somewhat by decreasing column resistors, but if you ever overdrive _any_ of your columns, you'll fuck up _all_ the readouts - with a chance of fucking up the next row readout, too (and that's the main reason why xwhatsit is so finicky, btw).

More sense lines would have been nice, making bigger contact based vintage keyboards available for converting to bluetooth. Capsense is still a bit mythological to me, but I think I get the gist. I am hoping that some day someone will write capsense drivers for ZMK, that would be lovely. Somewhere in the depths of my todo (want to do), learning the details of capsense and writing a ZMK driver for it is there, but simpler (easier) projects tend to occupy my time.

@mmm: There's quite a lot of posts on DT by folk using VIA and VIAL. They're the apps people use for live-configuring keyboards with compatible firmwares. I must admit I loathe both pieces of software, myself. They're far too large for what they are and their interfaces are both very ugly, in many quite delightful ways. I ditched them on my Kishsaver and Beamspring, preferring the stone age route DMA dislikes so! Hey, a web editor and a hex file I can understand.

I'm not against the concept of a local app. I'm just yet to see it implemented well. Xwhatsit's GUI was… interesting. A real son of a bitch to ever run without crashing at launch on the Mac—and now completely broken as it's 32-bit only and unmaintained—but its visual design was part genius. Part something else as well, but!

Local open source GUI apps tend to be .. interesting. I've heard very good things about VIAL, but I have yet to try it. I've heard good things about it from 40% users even, and they tend to have more requirements in terms of advanced features. I'm afraid if I give it a shot I might convert to the cult of GUI-ism. At least I don't have to squint my eyes and tab my rows just the right amount, to be sure that it is in fact the right button I'm attempting to change.