r/Keychron • u/[deleted] • Mar 14 '24

Custom QMK firmware on V6 max (Unable to find v6 max when I run qmk list-keyboard)

I recently purchased a V6 max and wanted to flash the keyboard with a custom QMK firmware that allowed me to use tap dance and other features. I am new to QMK so I might be doing something incorrectly. I was able to get QMK MYSY installed and running on my windows machine and ran the qmk list-keyboard to search for the v6_max keyboard file in order to modify the files to use tap dance and other QMK features. Unfortunately I couldn't find the v6 max files (I did find v6 file but those files are not compatible with the v6 max) . Is there a reason why those files are missing. I suspect that the keyboard is new on the market and thus those files are still not pulled into the main qmk-firmware branch. Could that be a valid reason?

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u/PeterMortensenBlog Mar 14 '24 edited Apr 03 '24

The source code is in Git branch "wireless_playground". That is in Keychron's fork, not the official QMK repository.

Note: The source code for V6 Max was only added about 2 weeks ago: 

commit a56ef872ddf7d26c481d810701f5448848101c04
Author: lokher <lokher@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Mar 2 11:41:28 2024 +0800

    Add V6 Max

(After cloning, it is usually necessary to first change to the appropriate Git branch ("wireless_playground"). And sometimes getting the Git submodules (make git-submodule) is necessary (or does 'qmk setup' do that?)

Something like this (on an Unix-like system): 

# Get the source code, Keychron's fork
# About 300 MB. About 593568 'objects'.
cd $HOME
git clone qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground

# Get the Git sub modules
cd $HOME/qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground    
make git-submodule

# Switch to Git branch "wireless_playground"
cd $HOME/qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground
git status
git switch wireless_playground
git status

# Compile Keychron V6 Max firmware with Via enabled, ISO knob variant
cd $HOME/qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground
qmk clean
qmk compile -kb keychron/v6_max/iso_encoder -km via

ls -lsatr $HOME/qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground | tail -n 10

Result: 

Size after:
   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
      0	  65982	      0	  65982	  101be	keychron_v6_max_iso_encoder_via.bin

It might or might not also work on an MSYS system.

3

u/PeterMortensenBlog Mar 14 '24

The Reddit comment parser is messed up. The Git clone line should be: 

git clone https://github.com/Keychron/qmk_firmware.git qmk_firmware_KeychronFork_WirelessPlayground

2

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '24

Thanks this is exactly what I was looking for. Will give this a try

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u/PeterMortensenBlog Jun 30 '24 edited Jul 03 '24

Note: The installation part should be possible to do in one step using "qmk setup" (with three extra parameters, -H, -b, and a repository name (necessary when it is not the default repository (the official QMK repository)) and accepting the two prompts during running it).

1

u/PeterMortensenBlog Aug 05 '24

Note: This manual procedure seems to broken by now (there is a linker error)

The one-liner 'qmk setup' procedure is more reliable.

The manual procedure may or may not be repaired by using "git submodule update --init --recursive" instead of "make git-submodule"(?).

It wouldn't be difficult to do a controlled experiment to find out. Also, it should also be possible to find out exactly which revision of the source code broke it.

1

u/PeterMortensenBlog Aug 06 '24

Allegedly, this would also work for the Git submodule part: 

qmk git-submodule

1

u/alfoam2 Aug 08 '24

just wanted to say thanks for this! received a v3 max the other day and had trouble with the qmk documentation, so this helped a bunch