A Brief Intro
So recently, around the time i wrote this post, i need to flash my mechanical keyboard. The harsh thing is that, the GUI QMK toolbox only available on windows and macOS, meanwhile i use linux.
So, i need to use the QMK CLI to flash my mechanical keyboard. This post is some kind of notes for my future self.
“Humans live by forgetting”, some people said. Without further ado, let’s get started!
Install QMK Firmware
First thing first, we need to check if QMK firmware already installed on our system. We can do that with the command below:
command -v qmk
If the output is empty, then we need to install QMK firmware first. If the output is not empty, we can skip this process.
There’s a newbie guide on how to install QMK firmware on linux, we can them out here .
There are a few options to install QMK firmware on linux. We can install QMK firmware with our linux distro package manager or from python pip.
In this post, we will use python pipx to install QMK firmware. We can install QMK firmware from python pipx with this command:
pipx install qmk
Make sure you already have
pipxinstalled on your machine.
Follow the instruction from the installation process, including installing
dependencies on your system and copy the 50-qmk.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/.
Copying the
50-qmk.rulesmake QMK can detect the bootloader of our mechanical keyboard. If we didn’t do that, even if our mechanical keyboard already in bootloader mode, QMK won’t be able to detect our mechanical keyboard.
After we install QMK firmware, we need to setup the QMK CLI. We can do that with this command:
qmk setup
By default, the installation directory will be on our home directory.
Personally i don’t really want to put the QMK installation on my home
directory, so i added -H flag to move the installation directory to
somewhere else, like this:
qmk setup -H all-repos/qmk_firmware
If the setup already finished, try running:
qmk doctor
and see if there’s any issue with the installation.
Flashing with QMK CLI
There’s a newbie guide on how to flash our mechanical keyboard using QMK CLI, we can find it here .
The point is, we need to know if our mechanical keyboard supported by QMK. We can check the supported mechanical keyboard here .
Let’s say our mechanical keyboard is dz60rgb with ansi layout version 1, we can flash our mechanical keyboard with this command:
qmk flash -kb dztech/dz60rgb_ansi/v1 -km default
For more info about the flags, we can use
qmk flash --help.
Unfortunately, my current mechanical keyboard is not supported, which is synthesis60 version 2. I need to get the hex file from the mechanical keyboard designer (and fortunately he’s within reach).
In case you also need the synthesis60 version 2 hex file, you can check it here .
So, to use our own hex file rather than using the default that QMK supported, we can use this command:
qmk flash <path-to-hex-file>
Here’s an example:
qmk flash ~/downloads/dyz_synthesis60_atmega_vial.hex
All right, that’s it from me. See you next time!