qmk_firmware/keyboards/hhkb/yang

HHKB Alternate Controller (YANG HHKB BLE Mod)

An alternative controler for the HHKB designed by YANG (yangdigi) based on the hasu controller.

• Keyboard Maintainer: Kan-Ru Chen
• Hardware Supported: YANG HHKB BLE Controller
• Hardware Availability: https://kbdfans.com/products/hhkb-ble-mod-upgrade-module

Make example for this keyboard (after setting up your build environment):

make hhkb/yang:default

To flash, first boot your keyboard into bootloader (hold ESC and attach usb cable) then a virtual USB storage should appear. You can copy the hhkb_yang_default.bin file to the virtual USB storage and override the HHKB_BLE.BIN file in there.

Make sure to unmount and eject the virtual USB storage.

Features:

• QMK (via USB)
• Bluetooth (BLE)
• Power saving mode
  • Idle mode
  • Deep sleep mode
• LEDs
• Battery service
• Special commands
  • Switch BT peer

Entering flash mode

Different ways to enter flash mode:

• Press and hold the ESC key. Insert the USB cable to enter the flash mode. When the OS shows the drive disk, you can release the key.

• Use the magic command LSHIFT+RSHIFT+B to reboot to bootloader then quickly hold the ESC key.

If you reflash the wrong firmware or did not reflash successfully, you can no longer enter the flash mode, especially the wireless keyboard with battery. You need to turn off the keyboard's power switch, and re-enter the flash mode, reflash the correct firmware.

After entering the bootloader(flash mode), three indicators on the top right of the HHKB BLE controller will flash. LED3(green) will flash quickly when writing firmware to the controller.

If these three leds are not soldered or your hhkb case is black, you can't know their status, but you can still see LED3 under the right USB port.

How to reliably flash LUFA MassStorage bootloader on Linux

The FAT filesystem on Linux very often cannot flush the write cache, leading to broken firmware in the flash.

We can use dd to write to the virtual block storage directly to bypass the vfs layer.

dd if=FLASH.bin of=<path of virtual block device> seek=4

Skip 4 sectors because the default sector size of the virtual device and dd is 512 bytes and the emulated flash file starts at 5th sector.

How to find the path of the virtual block device

After the keyboard boots into flash mode, on Linux system you should be able to find the block device in dmesg logs.

For exmaple if you type

sudo dmesg

You should find something like

[357885.143593] usb 1-1.4: USB disconnect, device number 24
[357885.627740] usb 1-1.4: new full-speed USB device number 25 using xhci_hcd
[357885.729486] usb 1-1.4: New USB device found, idVendor=03eb, idProduct=1962, bcdDevice= 0.01
[357885.729492] usb 1-1.4: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[357885.745620] SCSI subsystem initialized
[357885.746712] usb-storage 1-1.4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[357885.746818] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-1.4:1.0
[357885.746919] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[357885.747689] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[357886.766755] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     LUFA     Bootloader       0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[357886.773216] scsi 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[357886.777474] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] 134 512-byte logical blocks: (68.6 kB/67.0 KiB)
[357886.780300] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] Write Protect is off
[357886.780302] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[357886.783113] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] Asking for cache data failed
[357886.783114] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] Assuming drive cache: write through
[357886.842676]  sdx:
[357886.859528] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdx] Attached SCSI removable disk

The sdx is the block device name and the full path is at /dev/sdx The above flash command will become

dd if=FLASH.bin of=/dev/sdx seek=4

Caution: if set to incorrect device it may wipe out your actual disk.

Help page of original firmware

http://help.ydkb.io/doku.php?id=en:kb-mods:hhkb-ble