“Excellent little keyboard! Works great and assembly and programming were easy and fun! Using it as a traditional 10-kay at the moment but excited to set up some macros on it at some point. :)”
“Great little kit, which provides a fun way to learn a little about mechanical keyboards and creating macros without getting onto an intimidating and potentially expensive learning curve, and the glowy lights provide a soothing desk companion after dark.
That said, I may never figure out how to realise the potential of the Keybow in ways suited to my needs - the documentation is relatively sparse, and there aren't many projects on Github from other users, with the most comprehensive of those having been archived, so if programming isn't your forte you might struggle a bit.
I'll continue to chip away at it, but suspect that ultimately I'll use the Pi Zero WH for other things.”
“Pretty easy to build- great guide/documentation for that. The one issue I had was the super-thin plastic spacer piece came broken in one place and broke again in another place when I took the protective film off of it but turns out it doesn't really matter that it's broken once the screws are in.
Hardware feels pretty solid overall. The plate is fiberglass I think and felt a little flimsy during the build but feels totally solid during use. The only thing I was slightly disappointed by is that the RGB lighting seems kinda budget- the lights look nice but the color differentiation is not great- you need the colors to be pretty different from one another to register visually as separate colors. This was not a huge deal for me.
Programming the board in Lua is great! I really enjoyed that part and even was able to do some more advanced stuff not in the documentation. The code package supplied is very comprehensive- a ton of helper functions to make creating your layout easier and the example layouts included made it super easy for me (a self-taught developer by trade) to create my own custom macro pad layout to do different tasks on my Macbook. I recently also built a keyboard that I could program using QMK/VIA and you get all the same functionality and more with this board.
My only feedback for programming is that it would nice to have a debugging tool so it wasn't so much trial and error.
All in all a really fun project/tool and if you don't end up using it as a macro pad long term you still have a sweet mini PI to use for other things!”
“Really easy to put together! Especially liked the professional looking box it all came in. It'd be nice to have QMK firmware for this or slightly more frequently updated s/w on GitHub, but hacking away at it is all part of the fun!”
“This doesn't work properly for Norwegian language keyboards. If I want to use it I need to change keyboard input language every time I want to input something from my keybow. That's somewhat of a dissappointment.”
“I am having some serious issues with programming this thing. It supposes that I'm using an international English keyboard (I think?), which I'm not. I understand that the local KEYCODES in the keybow.lua file configures the keys on the input keyboard. But how the logic works is not explained anywhere. So far, the keybow is useless to me. I've spent hours testing different ways of trying to just type a litteral backslash, but am now close to giving up. Documentation please!”
