I replaced my keyboard of many years with a Drop.com Alt keyboard. This keyboard uses QMK firmware, which allows you to create modified firmware and run it on your keyboard. These are my notes about how I built a copy of the firmware locally and pushed it to my keyboard.
These notes are strongly based on The QMK Tutorial but I find it helpful to have my exact steps documented.
Fork
Fork https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware
using the GitHub web user interface (now I have https://github.com/salcode/qmk_firmware
)
Note: In retrospect, I’m not certain I needed this fork since I’m putting all of my modifications in a new separate repo (https://github.com/salcode/salcode-drop-alt
).
Install Tools
brew install qmk/qmk/qmk
Close terminal and re-open
Setup
qmk setup salcode/qmk_firmware -H ~/code/qmk_firmware
Build
qmk compile -kb massdrop/alt -km default
Note: drop.com was formerly massdrop.com, which I assume is why the keyboard is called massdrop/alt
Set Defaults
qmk config user.keyboard=massdrop/alt
qmk config user.keymap=default
Now, Build can be completed with
qmk compile
Create New Keymap
qmk config user.keymap=salcode-drop-alt
qmk new-keymap
salcode keymap directory created in: ~/code/qmk_firmware/keyboards/massdrop/alt/keymaps/salcode
Create Git Repo
cd ~/code/qmk_firmware/keyboards/massdrop/alt/keymaps/salcode-drop-alt
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial commit: default massdrop/alt'
Load Firmware
I’m following the instructions on https://github.com/Massdrop/mdloade (and I’m on a Mac).
Download:
applet-mdflash.bin
mdloader_mac
To make mdloader_mac
executable we run
chmod u+x mdloader_mac
Then run
./mdloader_mac --first --download ~/code/qmk_firmware/massdrop_alt_salcode-drop-alt.bin --restart
While this is running, hit Fn
+ b
on the keyboard
Further Customizations
You can find further customizations in my GitHub repository: https://github.com/salcode/salcode-drop-alt/.
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