The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Keychron C3 Pro Keyboard: Taming

    Having set the Moonlander to use Auto Shift, I’ve come to depend on it, so I got a Keychron C3 Pro keyboard for one of the Basement Shop’s PCs because it glows in the dark and can be configured with QMK:

    Keychron C3 Pro - tamed
    Keychron C3 Pro – tamed

    The default setup has rainbow hues cycling across the keyboard, which I find entirely too distracting. Although you can manually select the solid-color variant from the myriad possibilities using the keyboard, I forced a solid color with this config.h file:

    #define RGB_MATRIX_DEFAULT_ON true // Sets the default enabled state, if none has been set
    #define RGB_MATRIX_DEFAULT_MODE RGB_MATRIX_SOLID_COLOR // Sets the default mode, if none has been set
    #define RGB_MATRIX_DEFAULT_HUE 36  // Sets the default hue value, if none has been set
    #define RGB_MATRIX_DEFAULT_SAT 255 // Sets the default saturation value, if none has been set
    #define RGB_MATRIX_DEFAULT_VAL 255 // Sets the default brightness value, if none has been set
    
    

    Enabling Auto Shift requires this rules.mk file:

    AUTO_SHIFT_ENABLE = yes
    

    Both of those go in the keymap directory defining the keyboard mapping for my custom setup:

    qmk_firmware/keyboards/keychron/c3_pro/ansi/rgb/keymaps/ednisley
    

    The keymap.c file remains unchanged, although I’m mildly tempted to toss the Mac layouts overboard.

    For the record, setting QMK to compile that keyboard configuration goes like this:

    qmk setup -H /base_directory/…/qmk_firmware
    <snippage>
    qmk new-keymap -kb keychron/c3_pro/ansi/rgb -km ednisley
    qmk config user.keyboard=keychron/c3_pro/ansi/rgb user.keymap=ednisley
    qmk compile
    qmk flash
    

    Flashing the keyboard firmware goes like this:

    • Run qmk flash
    • Unplug the USB cable
    • Hold down the Esc key
    • Plug in the USB cable
    • Release the Esc key

    I should boot the Atreus configuration into the current decade, but that’s for later.