Welcome to the Mostly Harmless vckyb6

Introduction

vckyb6 is a small macro pad that offers quick access to common keyboard shortcuts that might be useful during video conferences and meetings.

Why?

Keyboard shortcuts are good ways of quickly doing something - as compared to using the mouse to click around the screen. Most video conferencing applications have built-in keyboard shortcuts to aid activities such as mute/un-mute or toggling the video or raising the hand and so on.

Most of these keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately, require the use of single or multiple keys (eg. CTRL + D or CTRL + ALT + C). These can not only be difficult to remember but also tough for children to use or use with one-hand.

Enter: Custom Keyboards

A custom programmable keyboard can send complex keystrokes or key sequences or even macros to the computer on the click of a single button. This means that one need not remember complex keyboard shortcuts and can instead just press a button to do the job.

The custom keyboard can be even have multiple layers of shortcuts so that it can be used in a similar manner with multiple video conferencing tools.

Compiling and Flashing the keymap

1. Close the qmk_firmware repository from:

   https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/

   You can also use this mirror on sovran.dev:

   https://sovran.dev/mh/qmk_firmware

2. Pull in the qmk_firmware submodules:

   cd qmk_firmware/
   make git-submodule
   

3. Install the qmk command-line interface:

   apt-get install python3 python3-pip
   pip3 install qmk
   

4. Setup qmk dependencies:

   cd qmk_firmware/
   qmk setup
   

Running qmk setup should install the necessary tools required to compile and flash the keyboard firmware. On Debian, this will do the equivalent of:

apt-get install build-essential avr-gcc arm-none-eabi-gcc avrdude dfu-util 
dfu-programmer

Now you should be able to compile your firmware.

5. Clone this repository into keyboards/mh/:

   cd qmk_firmware/
   mkdir keyboards/mh/
   cd keyboards/mh/
   git clone https://sovran.dev/mh/vckyb6/
   

6. Now compile the firmware:

   make mh/vckyb6:default
   

7. Reset your keyboard and put it into programming mode and then flash the firmware:

   make mh/vckyb6:default:flash
   

USB Messages:

You should see messages similar to these when you plugin the keyboard. Run sudo dmesg to check:

 usb 1-3.2: new full-speed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
 usb 1-3.2: New USB device found, idVendor=beef, idProduct=0008, bcdDevice= 0.01
 usb 1-3.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
 usb 1-3.2: Product: vckb6
 usb 1-3.2: Manufacturer: Mostly Harmless
 input: Mostly Harmless vckb6 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.2/1-3.2:1.0/0003:BEEF:0008.0078/input/input232
 hid-generic 0003:BEEF:0008.0078: input,hidraw5: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [Mostly Harmless vckb6] on usb-0000:00:14.0-3.2/input0
 input: Mostly Harmless vckb6 Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.2/1-3.2:1.1/0003:BEEF:0008.0079/input/input233
 input: Mostly Harmless vckb6 System Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.2/1-3.2:1.1/0003:BEEF:0008.0079/input/input234
 input: Mostly Harmless vckb6 Consumer Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.2/1-3.2:1.1/0003:BEEF:0008.0079/input/input235
 input: Mostly Harmless vckb6 Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.2/1-3.2:1.1/0003:BEEF:0008.0079/input/input236
 hid-generic 0003:BEEF:0008.0079: input,hidraw7: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Mostly Harmless vckb6] on usb-0000:00:14.0-3.2/input1

Credits

The repository and code is inspired by https://github.com/xkonni/qmk_xkonni_xk8/ and build upon the excellent qmk_firmware project.