QMK Drop Alt

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/.

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.