Customizing the Keychron Q1 with QMK Configurator and Toolbox

hey everybody welcome back to a better computer my name is matt and i recently got this this is the kikron q1 keyboard um and i like it for a lot of reasons but there's one little problem with it and it's these keys right here these top two put it right up here this is the insert key and this is the delete key and i want these to be flipped i want the delete key to be the top right button on my keyboard and this is a great excuse for me to get into just a little deeper into the keyboard customization scene as i'm going to try to reprogram this keyboard to actually make that just how the keyboard behaves with no like mac os or windows tricks i just want to reprogram the keyboard so i'm going to try to do that today i'm going to do it kind of in real time so you're going to see me struggle but hopefully it'll give you a good idea for how this works and this is just a very very small change i'm just flipping what two keys do but you can go much further with this so let's just jump in and hopefully you'll learn something okay so i'm here on my computer i'm typing into the keyboard right now and i've got a few relevant websites pulled up i'm using the qmk configurator to create my configuration i've got the qmk toolbox over here which is what you use to flash that new configuration onto your keyboard and i've got a link to the q1 user manual that kicron provides they've actually got quite a bit here so they have links to this there's also an app called via which i haven't used haven't looked into but yeah i'm just using qmk because it's the first one that i heard about and people seem to like it so links to all this will be in the description but i basically you get to the configurator and you want to find your keyboard you want to find um it's a lot easier it looks like if your keyboard is on the list uh so if you go into the list they've got a decent number here like this actually seems like a lot but i don't really know how many custom keyboards are out there but i just searched for q1 and there are three different versions here it looks like the 102 is the iso version so this is like the european layout with different keys there's the 101 which i don't quite know what this one is they're all listed as n a but then there's the 100 which i'm pretty sure is mine god help me if it's not i think i'll screw up the board and i'll have to really fix things um if i screw this up but yeah so this is the layout for um my board so this looks exactly like mine the buttons are exactly the same everything looks great um so this i think is the layout that we've got here um so now i've got that uh if there are multiple options for layouts for this you can choose from them there's only one here so i'm going to stick with that and then you can give it a name so i'll do abc layout i guess this is just so i can save it or i guess the name will be this if i export it but anyway so what you can do here is you can go ahead and map things so if you have a keyboard that's not on the list you can like click on a key and then hit the button on your keyboard and it's going to um kind of put that there or show that there or this is going to do that yeah oh yeah yeah oh shoot yeah i screwed it up so i've already screwed it up so i actually accidentally put a cue there so if i want to put escape back there i hit the escape button for tab i can make tab do an i but i don't want to do that i want to do tab as tab so anyway these are already laid out perfectly because of the keyboard on their list an interesting thing to note is you've got these things over here called layers and so there's layer 0 1 2 and 3 on this and it turns out what these are are different kind of modes your keyboard can be in so we're on layer 0 right now which is kind of the default one and you can see this is the layout of the keys and this is just kind of the standard layout this like just looks like what i'm looking at on the keyboard so what's layer one layer one is what happens when you hold down the fn key so that's the fn key i'm kind of down on the bottom right of the keyboard that's the things you can do there so there's like the rgb toggle there's the rgb mode brightness like all that stuff can be changed and so that's actually a nice way for me to see all the controls for the lights on this keyboard but that's what happens when i hold down fn what about two and three then so two is actually the windows layout so there's a switch on the back of the q1 where you can toggle between mac layouts and windows layout and so what's that that's actually doing is setting your different layers it sounds like so layer 0 is mac layout layer 1 is mac layout when holding the fn key layer 2 is the windows layout so when you flip it over to windows this is the layout and layer 3 is as you might expect when you're holding down the fn key on windows these are the things that it does so yeah that's what's going on with all this um and so basically again you could totally change these you can add more i don't know how that's going to work so i'm not going to do that but yeah so we're just going to make a very simple change and so i want to swap delete and insert right so to do that is actually really easy so all i do is click and drag delete is over here insert is over here and i think that's it so i think that should be it another quick thing i'll note is that if your colors look different here there's a drop down here with a whole bunch of different themes you can use um it doesn't really change the functionality just changes how the keyboard looks doesn't matter so um let's go ahead and just say yeah that's it um so now that's the only change i want to make again you can go much further than this if you'd like i can download this as a json file so i'm just going to save it do this automatically and so that's saved an abc layout yeah abc underscore layout.json and it looks like i can go ahead and reload this at a later point if i want to kind of like make adjustments based on this layout again making one change so i don't really need to do this um there's some stuff here where i can test keyboard inputs so i can like type p and see what it thinks that is and there's kind of a console down here showing um i could do abc and there we go i clicked all of them and it looks like you can just kind of like confirm do all the buttons show up here as i expect them to um right so uh yeah that's kind of how all that works we don't really need that um this will clear your keymap are you sure you want to load yes i guess so okay so for whatever reason you kind of go back this would be a good chance for me to try to upload and see if it flips them so i could just drag it but let's see if the upload works yep um let's go to downloads abc layout done there we go that did work it loaded four layers and insert and delete are in the correct spot now and i should still see that's that one this is the windows layout and the windows fn okay so this is what i want now so now what i want to do is i want to compile so i'm compiling the uh keymap it's called so this is running it's running on their server so it's just going to take as long as their server is going to take to do it and what this should give me at the end is a download where i can download um i'll just have a download that i can use with this qmk toolbox to uh go ahead and change the key mappings so this is taking a second uh we're just kind of waiting you can see the console here in the background i think yeah there we go so it looks like it's about done so it compiled it's all done uh there we go and now how do i get it okay here we go download the firmware there we go so i'm downloading the firmware uh i want to leave the page yeah that's fine um we're going to save it as a dot hex file and that's in my downloads folder now so we'll grab that in a minute so now we need to actually flash this to the keyboard so the keyboard hasn't changed yet so when i go to the gmk or qmk toolbox github page again linked in the description there's a whole bunch of stuff here ultimately what i want to do here is i want to go to the releases page and i'm not going to do the beta i don't want a beta for my keyboard software on mac os i'm going to download the qmk.toolbox.package.pkg and on windows you would do the qmk underscore toolbox.exe or the install actually i don't know i'm actually not sure on windows so on mac os i know for sure it's this one i don't know about windows hopefully another video can help with that so um sorry um so we can get rid of my browser here and i actually have already downloaded it so i'm gonna double click it and depend on your mac os settings it might warn you about this and say i can't open this because it's not from a trusted developer this is where you get into your own decision making whether you want to trust it or not if you decide you do you want to right click it and you want to do open and now it's going to show you that same dialog but there's an open option so we're going to say do that so now we're going to run the installer and if this forks my computer somehow always just a tip for mac os whenever you're doing an installer through a pkg file like this um you want to hit customize to make sure it's not installing other things like it isn't as usual usually the case anymore but it used to be like you would see like yahoo toolbars and you'd just see like other junk here and you could uncheck those but this is just installing the qmk toolbox so we'll go ahead um there we go installation was successful and so i should just be able to search for uh qmk toolbox this is in my applications folder and here we go so this looks like there's not a lot here so this should be easy i could read the instructions i'm not going to um and so click open or drag to window to select file okay so i'm going to say open and we're going to open the keychron q1 rev100 abc layout.hex so there we go so that's the file um what is this at mega32u4 i'm gonna be honest i have no idea and this is avr only i have no idea what this is [Music] okay so i figured out the issue um first i found this comment on the github page from september where someone was running into the same issue i was and it turns out you need to just don't even worry about that just put your uh keyboard into where they call bootloader mode and then click the flash button in the configurator my button is not there and i don't know what how to get in bootloader mode if i had read the instructions i could read the instructions i'm not going to so i would have seen here factory reset i need to download the right firmware which is that hex file i need to remove the space bar so right here you can kind of see that i'll go into macro mode there it is inside the keyboard we're going real close love macro mode on the new iphone um but yeah so that's the button i need to press and hold while i am uh restarting the uh or i'm plugging it in so let me go ahead and it's actually very small so i need something small to press it with that's not metal um of course okay this will work so i'm gonna use this little bit of the uh an apple watch band i'm just gonna poke that in there so okay so i just did it and there's a red light that just turned on in there so it looks like that worked um and so now if i go here there we go so i've got the flash option i'm going to keep my camera here so you can see the light um and so okay so here's my file and here we go it's connected it does say in the instructions here to make sure you're using the atmega32u4 at mega32u4 cool here's the hex and then flash let's see what happens attempting flash please don't remove the device okay um erasing flash success checking memory empty force good good and now this is lit up all my lights are lit up okay did this work um let's find out okay so it's plugged in and everything let me see if i can quit that worked and now let me just get my key in here and i'm gonna hit the insert button i'll get this going as well i'm gonna hit the insert button and see if it deletes it does yes okay it totally worked so i flipped these so now all i have to do is i'm going to my keycap puller doesn't work great in these kind of corner pieces i'm an idiot i'm just going to pull them off i didn't need to do anything so okay delete key you go right there insert key you go oh oh boy right there i will never use you but now i use you all the time and you're right on the edge where i want you to be it worked that's very exciting okay so that was very simple like let's does everything else work kind of how i would expect it to that's an f3 um that might i'm in mac mode do my media keys still work that still works um [Music] that's f4 f3 that's brightness those work i seem to have lost f3 and f4 those don't seem to work as they used to um so i'm going to have to see about that there's probably some mapping that i have to do there but i never use those keys on purpose anyway i guess i do use f3 so i love to figure that one out but yeah um that actually kind of worked so i am super excited that i was able to fix it myself i'm getting my key or my space key back on there there we go um but it totally worked it's definitely a slightly scary thing to do to do it but um it worked smoothly and yeah i don't really i didn't really have any issues which is great um so yeah that's it for me today i think uh kind of a i don't know anticlimactic i just don't know how to wrap it up but that's how you um do it that's how i just did it live on video and uh yeah hopefully this was helpful i'm kind of demystifying how this all works and uh yeah let me know in the comments if there's anything else you'd like to see with this keyboard because it's really cool to do this sort of thing and i'm looking forward to do a little bit more if i can so thank you so much for watching bye [Music]

Channel: A Better Computer

Views: 35,589

Keywords: productivity, tutorial, apple, tech news

Id: hHPcejmgty0

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022