I got interested in the Makerdiary M60 because I wanted a 60% keyboard with dedicated, physical arrow keys in the lower-right corner. Most 60% keyboards I've seen, even ones with very powerful remapping capabilities, have a FN key in the lower-right which for safety reasons cannot be moved or remapped. When the documentation said "If you already Python, configuring the keyboard is simple", I knew I had found the right board for me.

The M60 comes preloaded with very old firmware, and no instructions for how to get caught up with upstream CircuitPython. Thus, this howto!

In this repo, you will find the configuration that I use on my own keyboard. It comes with the following keymap and special features:

• FN key on the left, between Tab and Shift (i.e. where Caps Lock usually goes)
• Arrow keys in the lower right, Left-Down-Up-Right
• ESC next to 1
  • tilde available with Shift-ESC
  • backtick available with FN-ESC
• F1-F12 available with FN-1234567890-=
• All tenkeyless special keys, in hopefully-obvious places
• Alternate arrows available with FN-hjkl, just like vi
• Keyboard-adjustable RGB lighting
  • FN-q to cycle through the builtin modes
  • FN-ws to adjust brightness
  • FN-ad to adjust hue
  • FN-TAB to save current settings
• CIRCUITPY drive and serial console hidden
  • Hold d (for "drive", natch) while plugging in the keyboard to make them available temporarily
• Optional USB Boot Keyboard support
  • This is required for old Macs, some BIOSes, and certain KVMs
  • This is incompatible with using the Consumer Control keys (e.g. Play, Pause, Eject)
  • To enable Boot Keyboard support, uncomment the appropriate line in boot.py

• Makerdiary Store
• Official Documentation
• Upstream Github
• CircuitPython for M60

First, you will have to update UF2. Unfortunately, the M60 ships with a UF2 that predates the UF2 auto-updater. If you're already well-versed in Arduino development, you know what to do.

I'm new to Arduino, so I followed the command-line update documentation.

On Ubuntu, I did it like this:

• Download the newest UF2 .zip for m60

wget "https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Bootloader/releases/download/0.8.3/m60_keyboard_bootloader-0.8.3_s140_6.1.1.zip"

• Install adafruit-nrfutil into a virtualenv

mkdir adafruit-nrfutil
virtualenv adafruit-nrfutil
./adafruit-nrfutil/bin/pip3 install adafruit-nrfutil

• Update UF2 firmware

./adafruit-nrfutil/bin/adafruit-nrfutil --verbose dfu serial -p /dev/ttyACM0 -b 115200 --singlebank --touch 1200 --package m60_keyboard_bootloader-0.8.3_s140_6.1.1.zip

• Check that it worked

cat "/media/${USERNAME}/M60KEYBOARD/INFO_UF2.TXT"

With UF2 updated, we can download the newest CircuitPython for M60 and copy it onto the M60KEYBOARD drive to install it.

For example:

wget "https://downloads.circuitpython.org/bin/makerdiary_m60_keyboard/en_US/adafruit-circuitpython-makerdiary_m60_keyboard-en_US-8.2.9.uf2"
cp adafruit-circuitpython-makerdiary_m60_keyboard-en_US-8.2.9.uf2 "/media/${USERNAME}/M60KEYBOARD/"

Now, we can load modules, code.py, and boot.py onto the keyboard by copying them onto the CIRCUITPY drive.

For example:

• Download the code

git clone "https://github.com/tabbysable/python-keyboard.git"

• Copy keyboard module

cp -r python-keyboard/keyboard/ "/media/${USERNAME}/CIRCUITPY/lib/"

• Install dependencies

pip3 install -r python-keyboard/requirements.txt --no-deps -t "/media/${USERNAME}/CIRCUITPY/lib/"

• Copy code.py and boot.py, and make sure it finishes

cp python-keyboard/boot.py "/media/${USERNAME}/CIRCUITPY/"
sync
cp python-keyboard/code.py "/media/${USERNAME}/CIRCUITPY/"
sync

• Unplug / replug they keyboard and celebrate
  • You should see purple lights!

Now that your keyboard is working, you may customize it by modifying code.py and boot.py according to your preferences. Hold d while plugging in the keyboard to make the CIRCUITPY drive visible, and do whatever sounds cool.

Good luck, and have fun!