Wow, this is so well done. I really appreciate the attention to detail and how you went the extra mile to really make it look good.

The bums will always lose, do you hear me Lebowski??

I have successfully driven a chain of RGBs from a Xiao controller, although not running ZMK. One thing you could do is write a little Arduino program to just drive the RGBs, and that will let you isolate whether it’s the hardware or ZMK.

One easy thing to check on the hardware side: Are you running the power to the RGBs at 5v or 3.3V? The logic voltage of the Xiao is 3.3v, so you either need to power the RGBs from the 3.3v pin (out of spec but it will work fine, probably) or if you are powering the RGBs from 5v then you need to shift the voltage level of the data pin up from 3.3v to something closer to 5v. The RGBs compare the voltage on the data line to their power voltage to decide what’s a 1 vs 0 on the data line. 3.3v is low enough below 5v that the RGBs will interpret the digital signal as entirely 0s

I do this same thing but with laser cut cardstock. I also made a set of individual columns from cardstock with a mm scale on them. A little double sided tape onto my desk or another piece of cardboard, and I can very rapidly iterate on a design

Thank you very much! I sent you a PM

Thanks Hazel! The feeling is mutual, I’ve had your badwings boards bookmarked myself for a while now.

I think you’re spot on. I use Instagram for one niche sport I do, hydrofoil surfing. Everyone who foils is on there, and as a result the development speed of this 5-year-old sport is incredible. Someone in Australia invents a new maneuver, posts a video of it, and a few hours later while they’re sleeping people in America are trying it out.

None of that is happening on pixelfed. I tried it out too, and, meh. There’s just nothing interesting on there, and it’s too complicated to explain to non techies. So there’s a huge barrier to entry and no compelling reason to surmount it. Heck, I have an advanced degree in informatics and I barely made it over the choose an instance wall. My perma-stoned surfing buddies don’t stand a chance.

This is similar to how I learned Miryoku, I slowly migrated my TKL board over to it incrementally. First I dropped the number row and did a Planck-style layout, then once I was comfortable with that I added homerow mods to it, then once that felt good I did what you’ve done here. After those baby steps, I built a Fifi keyboard. I’ve been on Miryoku for about two years and am stoked on it (although I’ve recently adapted it down to 34 keys and like that better)

If I may be so bold, you may be thinking of my white-on-white Planck that I posted to Reddit a year or so ago, that I blanked with acrylic rectangles and double sided tape.