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Cem Aksoylar 5bed3de677 Finish documentation section
2023-10-05 00:05:13 -07:00

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ZMK State Of The Firmware #6 Cem Aksoylar Documentation maintainer https://github.com/caksoylar https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/7876996
SOTF
keyboards
firmware
oss
ble

Welcome to the sixth ZMK "State Of The Firmware" (SOTF)!

This update will cover all the major activity since SOTF #5. That was over a year ago (again!), so there are many new exciting features and plenty of improvements to cover!

Recent Activity

Here's a summary of the various major changes since last time, broken down by theme:

Keymaps/Behaviors

Hold-tap improvements

andrewjrae added the global quick tap property to the hold-tap behavior in #1187, which prevents the hold behavior from triggering if it hasn't been a certain duration since the last key press. This is a useful feature to prevent accidental hold activations during quick typing and made its way into many keymaps!

[urob] added the hold-trigger-on-release property in #1423. This significantly increases the usefulness of positional constraints on hold-taps, since it allows combining multiple holds such as different modifiers for home-row mods usage.

Masking mods in mod-morphs

[aumuell], [vrinek] and [urob] contributed to improving the behavior of mod-morphs by masking the triggering modifiers and added keep-mods property in #1412. This unlocks more use cases for mod-morphs, since you are no longer constrained to emitting keycodes that work well with the triggering modifier keycodes.

Parameterized macros

petejohanson added macros that can be parameterized with one or two parameters in #1232. This allows users to define macros in a more modular way and is a nice quality-of-life improvement.

Arbitrary behaviors on encoder rotation

[nickconway] and petejohanson added sensor rotation behaviors to allow invoking arbitrary behaviors from encoders #1758. Previously encoder rotations could only invoke the key-press behavior &kp through the &inc_dec_kp binding, whereas now you can define new sensor rotation behaviors to invoke others.

(Note that currently behaviors that have "locality" such as &rgb_ug do not work as expected via encoder rotation bindings in split keyboards, due to issue #1494.)

Key toggle behavior

[cgoates] added the key toggle behavior in #1278, which can be used via its &kt binding to toggle the state of a keycode between pressed and released.

Bug fixes and other improvements

petejohanson, andrewjrae and okke-formsma tracked down and fixed an issue causing stuck keys when there are combos on key positions involving hold-tap behaviors in #1411. This was an elusive bug that took a lot of effort from the community to nail down and fix!

[nguyendown] and joelspadin tracked down and fixed a couple tricky issues causing stuck keys with sticky keys in #1586, #1745.

okke-formsma fixed an issue allowing tap dances to be invoked by combos in #1518.

petejohanson tweaked the caps word behavior to ignore modifiers in #1330.

Bluetooth and Split Improvements

Multiple peripherals

xudongzheng contributed to add support for more than one peripheral per keyboard in #836. This allows setups such as split keyboards with more than two halves, or enable a BLE-based "dongle mode" via a third device running ZMK that can stay connected to a computer via USB.

Note that documentation is still lacking for utilizing more than one peripheral and there will potentially be changes in the build system to allow for more seamless configuration.

Pairing passkey requirement

petejohanson added the option to require passkey input while pairing to new devices in #1822. Enabling this will require you to enter a six digit passcode via the number keys on your keymap and press enter when pairing to a new device, enhancing security during the pairing procedure.

Split keyboard improvements

petejohanson contributed a fix to release held keys on peripheral disconnect #1340, which makes scenarios where a split disconnects unexpectedly less painful.

petejohanson also improved the settings_reset shield by making it clear bonds more reliably, and allow it to build for all boards in #1879.

petejohanson and xudongzheng contributed additional split connectivity improvements, via using directed advertising in #1913 and improving the robustness of central scanning in #1912.

Hardware Support

Encoders

petejohanson contributed a major refactor of encoder (and more generally sensor) functionality in #1039. While the documentation for these changes are still in progress, check out the dedicated blog post for more details.

This refactor paved way to implementing a long-awaited feature, encoder support in peripheral halves of split keyboards! Building upon the work by [stephen] in #728, petejohanson implemented support in #1841.

Direct GPIO driver

joelspadin extended the comprehensive debouncing framework used for matrix scan driver to the direct GPIO driver in #1288.

kurtis-lew added toggle mode support for direct GPIO driver #1305. This allows for adding toggle switches to a keyboard, by properly reading their initial state on boot and making sure the power use is efficient.

IO peripheral drivers

petejohanson added support for the 595 shift register commonly used with smaller controllers like Seeeduino Xiaos, in #1325.

[zhiayang] added the driver for the MAX7318 GPIO expander in #1295.

Underglow auto-off options

[ReFil] added two new RGB auto off options, one using an idle timeout and the other USB status in #1010.

nice!view support

nicell added support for nice!view, a memory display optimized for low power use in #1462. He also contributed a custom vertically-oriented status screen that is automatically enabled when the nice_view shield is used in #1768, since the default status screen has a horizontal orientation. Please see the instructions in the nice!view README if you would like to restore the stock status screen.

E-paper display initialization

petejohanson contributed EPD initialization improvements in #1098, which makes the keyboards using slow refresh displays such as the Corne-ish Zen much more responsive during initial boot.

Xiao BLE improvements

Various improvements were made for the Seeeduino Xiao BLE board in #1293, d0176f36, #1545 and #1927 by petejohanson and caksoylar, enabling features necessary for ZMK and improving its power use.

Zephyr 3.2 Upgrade

petejohanson once again contributed the massive work necessary for upgrading ZMK to Zephyr 3.2 in #1499, with review help from joelspadin and testing by the community. This Zephyr release brings with it upgrades to the display library LVGL, adds official support for the RP2040 controllers and many internal refactors to help future development. Check out the dedicated blog post for more details!

Documentation

Configuration docs

joelspadin, through a massive amount of work in #722, contributed a whole new section to the documentation: configuration! It enumerates the configuration options for each ZMK feature that might be relevant to users in dedicated pages, making it a very handy reference.

In addition, the overview page presents an overview of how configuration works in Zephyr in the context of ZMK, in terms of devicetree files (like the keymap files or shield overlays), and Kconfig ones (like the .conf files). It is very helpful in de-mystifying what the various files do and what syntax is expected in them.

New behavior guide

For any users or future contributors that might want to dive into writing their own ZMK behaviors, kurtis-lew wrote a useful guide on how to create new behaviors in #1268.

Tap dance and hold-tap documentation improvements

kurtis-lew also improved the documentation for these two behaviors in #1298, by updating the diagrams to better clarify how their timings work and adding examples for scenarios that are frequently asked by users.

Battery sensor documentation

joelspadin also added documentation for setting up battery sensors, typically required for new boards, in #868.

Shield interconnects

petejohanson updated the new shield guide for non-Pro Micro interconnects including Xiao, Arduino Uno and Blackpill in #1607.

Bluetooth feature page

petejohanson and caksoylar added a new Bluetooth feature page as part of #1499 and in #1818, detailing ZMK's Bluetooth implementation and troubleshooting for common problems.

In addition to the specific contributions listed above, various improvements and fixes to documentation are made by many users from the community, including but not limited to kurtis-lew, joelspadin, [filterpaper], [byran.tech], dxmh and caksoylar. These contributions are are all very appreciated!

Miscellaneous

Switch to a reusable user config workflow #1183 #1258

Pre-commit setup and standardize formatting #1651

Refactors by Joel #1269 #1255 ?

USB HID polling interval now defaults to 1 ms, thanks to joelspadin's tweak in #1271.

caksoylar added a couple configuration options for displays, including a setting to invert display colors in #1754 and an option to display the battery percentage for the stock status screen in #1563.

New Shields

New Boards

Coming Soon!

Some items listed in the last coming soon section are still under active development.

  • Caps/Scroll/Num Lock LED support
  • Mouse Keys
  • Wired split support
  • More modular approach to external boards/shields, custom code, user keymaps, etc.
  • More shields and boards

Statistics

Some statistics of interest for ZMK:

  • GitHub (lifetime stats)
    • 163 Contributors
    • 1239 Closed PRs
    • 1845 Stars
    • 1918 Forks
  • Discord Chat
    • 7865 total registered (130% up from last SOTF!)
  • Website (last 30 days)
    • 35.9K page views
    • 3.29K new users

Sponsorship

Open Collective Pete Johanson (detail what is used for what)

Thanks!

As we approach the two year birthday for ZMK, I am reminded of how far we have come in such a short time, in large part thanks to the amazing community that has grown around it. I am so grateful to have so many contributors, testers, and user believing in the project and helping make it a joy to work on.