on-keyboard remap capability

[benblazak]

Tentative, based on time and interest.

This would be implemented per keymap, the goal being to have something like the Kinesis.

Also, the UI being written by OrangeJewce and effh should (for windows people at least) make it much easier to do firmware remapping on the computer than it would be to do it on the keyboard alone. For the rest of us (and any power remappers), I plan to include a nice howto in the final documentation about modifying keymaps in the source code.

[benblazak]

If this gets implemented, it will be more complicated than I thought. Basically, altered stuff will have to be written to the EEPROM, which is only 1024 bytes - which is only large enough to hold about 2 full keymaps (with functions).

A couple options would be:

• Only write the keycode matrix to the EEPROM, and keep all of it there. This would require a default set of function matrices that would work with any possible remap.
• Only write changed codes to the EEPROM. This would require some sort of EEPROM lookup for every keypress/release, to see if an altered value was in there. I don't think it'd be too slow to do this, but testing would be good.

Of course, if the keymap we want to be programmable like this is only 1 (or maybe 2) layers, it doesn't matter, it should be fairly trivial to store the whole thing in the EEPROM and write some update functions. The logic of how the keypresses would activate the remap layer and how the remap layer would behave would be the hardest part.

Anyway, this is still a fairly low priority. I was just thinking about it today as I was moving the matrices from RAM to program space.

[benjamin-kett]

I think we should update this ticket with the fact a UI will handle much of the remapping work. We can directly flash the teensy using the compiled .hex (at least in theory), and IMO that will give us the ability to have many layouts stored directly onto the controller without needing to have "on the fly" remapping. Whilst this feature might be nice for quick changes, I don't know how feasible it is to do in phase 1 before people get something in hand, and we can then measure up the amount of demand for it,

Cheers,

[benblazak]

updated

[benblazak]

this may be reopened sometime in the future, but for now the issue is being closed as "won't implement". it would take a bit of ingenuity to get it to work, and i don't see a huge interest in it given the existence of the UIs, which allow for pretty quick remapping.

the ability to save and execute macros on-keyboard would be nice, and i can see that being really useful. but i'll reconsider that and open another issue if it seems to reasonable sometime later.