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Getting started

The board

The Eyelash Sofle is a wireless split keyboard. Each half runs on a nice!nano v2 (nRF52840) and has a nice!view display. The hardware and its original firmware come from the board’s designer (see Hardware); this repo vendors the shield definition and builds its own keymap on top.

Beyond the alpha keys, the board has:

  • a five-way joystick (up, down, left, right and a centre press), which each layer gives its own job;
  • a rotary encoder on the left half (volume by default, rebindable live in Studio);
  • RGB underglow on both halves: seven LEDs a half, one per column plus the thumb, so it lights zones rather than single keys.

The two halves

HalfRoleRuns
LeftBLE central: talks to your computer and to the right halfStudio (USB and BLE), the custom RPC modules, the underglow module
RightBLE peripheral: reports its keys to the left halfits keys, display and underglow strip

That split matters in a few places:

  • Studio and its stored keymap overlay live on the left half.
  • After clearing bonds, power the right half on first, so it is advertising when the left half starts scanning. See Pairing and Bluetooth.
  • Each half gets its own firmware file. See Flashing.

The firmware at a glance

  • ZMK main on Zephyr 4.1, through cormoran’s main+dya fork, every dependency pinned to a commit. See Firmware.
  • Home-row mods on S D F and J K L (Alt, Ctrl, Shift on each hand), held only when the other hand joins in. See Home-row mods & timing.
  • Nine layers: BASE, NAV, CODE, MEDIA, SYS|NUM, the GAME? picker, and three game layers. See Keymap.
  • Gaming mode: locked layers without any hold-tap. See Gaming mode.
  • Per-layer underglow from the in-repo zmk-rgb-layer module. See Underglow.
  • Studio keymap editing over USB and Bluetooth, no unlock key. See Studio.
  • Soft off with the combo Q + S + Z, held for two seconds; one press of the reset button wakes the board. Left alone, it also goes to sleep after an hour idle. See Combos.

Where to go next

New firmware onto the board: Flashing. Coming from a v2.x release: Upgrading to v3 first, since v3 needs a settings reset. Building your own: Building locally.

Flashing