I have a UHK60v2; it’s almost four years old now but in the last few months, I’m seeing occasional, random situations where the left side simply stops working.
Sometimes the LEDs go out; sometimes they don’t, but no keystrokes from the left side are detected. The right side continues to work as normal.
If I unplug the connecting cable and plug it back in, that usually fixes it, but sometimes even after doing that a couple times, the left side LEDs are still off and it does nothing. In those situations, I’ve had a little more luck unplugging the entire keyboard from USB and plugging it back in.
I do use it with a riser and a tented configuration, so the cable is the only connection between the halves.
I have firmware 15.0.1.
Some days this will happen every hour or so, maybe three or four times. Then it will go for days with no problem…then re-occur.
I’ve had this for almost four years, and have used it with Windows, Linux, and recently, a Macbook, though I don’t think the OS has anything to do with this.
Sorry to assume you already knew the process. It seems a few people have been unaware of how to do so recently. Maybe we need a more obvious sticky thread for some of the basics at the top of the forum…?
Download the file in the “Assets” section called “uhk-firmware-15.2.0.tar.gz”, but don’t extract it’s contents.
Then open Agent to the “Firmware” tab in the left panel, and in the main panel, click the button that says “Choose firmware file and flash it”.
I don’t really know all the details, but I had a discussion with the devs a while back that explained that. IIRC, when it comes to the firmware terminology, the UHK60’s left half is referred to as a module (not to be confused with one of the detachable modules). The UHK80’s FW is a little different though, which is why it has left and right directories.
Anyway, rest assured that FW contains everything for both halves. The flashing process should automatically use what it needs from the “tar.gz” file. No manual extraction necessary.
Ah – on macOS, when my browser (Firefox) downloaded that, it tried to be helpful and uncompressed the tarball, so the Agent file selector wouldn’t let me select it. Recompressing fixes that.
Perhaps the Agent could be fixed up to also allow selecting .tar files?
I flashed the 15.2 firmware. Now the tricky part is, we have to prove a negative – if things seem to be working, is that just because the issue is still there, but the intermittent/random nature means it just hasn’t happened yet again, or because the new firmware fixed it?
Two weeks with no trouble and now today it happened again. In fact, it’s worse now – before, I’d fiddle with the connector cable a bit, maybe unplug and re-plug-in the keyboard cable…today that is not working after many tries. I’ve had to switch to a different keyboard.
(Eventually my UHK started working again; I unplugged it from my laptop for quite some time, and later took the connector cable and just turned it around – that actually got the left side to work. That’s seems crazy that that would work…could it be the connector? Maybe I could try a replacement connector cable?)
Well, it’s definitely an easy fix if that’s the culprit. Maybe merge the halves together for a while to see if you can reproduce it with no bridge cable connected at all.
I’m a big guy and I keep the halves stretched pretty far apart (12"-16"), so I’ve gone through a few bridge cables on all three of my UHKs over the years. You can order them from the UHK Shop, etc., or build your own. Just make sure you use a cable with the connectors in crossover configuration.
Thinking more, I do suspect that it’s a bad cable. But as before, we have to prove a negative – I’ll try to remember next time this happens to try reconnecting the halves. (I use a pretty agressive tenting setup with the rise and have a little macropad thing between my UHK halves, so I don’t think of my UHK as something that connects back together…)
I hope it’s okay to piggyback off this thread, because it seems as though I’m having the problem described here. Got my V2 a while ago, and it’s been having problems with the left side blinking out every now and again. I came here to find a solution today because it’s become persistent.
I, too, tent at a high angle, and I keep my halves rather far apart. I had an inkling that it might be due to the bridge cable, and fiddling would seem to do something, but the problem would strike so intermittently that I could never be sure. However, I swapped out the cable with my V1 today, and it still happens.
For my part, all of the power in the left half blinks out, except for the key cluster module. I can hold down a key on the module, and it’ll always respond. Also, this happens when the keyboard halves are connected, too.
I updated to the latest firmware, and the problem persists. I’ve enabled the advanced debugging, and I see the following:
So, this is very interesting….could this be caused by some sort of electromagnetic interference?
When I see it blinking out, I can actually hear some sort of sound buzzing from somewhere, in coordination with the blinks. My center speaker, maybe?
But when I pulled the keyboard half from my keyboard tray and put it in my lap, creating some distance, it stopped blinking out, despite still hearing this sound.
Same-ish problem - the difference is my whole keyboard flickers out. Makes it so my signal for mouse drops and I end up typing something I don’t want instead of using mouse.
I assumed it was the USB C female connector. I can jostle it a bit and it sometimes works better for awhile. Having a hard time finding what part I need to replace it - there’s instructions and part on uhk site for part for v1 but not v2
There’s also a Reddit thread that had similar problem and they thought it was interference with their phone signal. They reported talking to someone at UHK and they confirmed?
Well, okay. I don’t want to be pedantic, but none of those seems to strictly fit here.
It’s not that the LED was flickering, but the entire keyboard’s power (except key cluster), as backlights were also going out and keys weren’t responsive.
I’m fairly certain I wasn’t moving my UHK away from wireless devices (my phone would be my only wireless device, and I don’t often set it on my desk), although it’s possible I’m wrong. I’ll keep a watch on that.
But I’m also curious as to how and why wireless signals (or normal EMF) could cause this on a wired keyboard, and also on only the left half. I had a V1 before getting this V2, and I never had such issues on that keyboard.
The right keyboard half is the master device. The other devices, including the left half and the modules, are slaves. Communication between master and slave devices gets garbled, causing such issues.
UHKs starting with the UHK 80 are unaffected because instead of I2C, they use UART protocol between the keyboard halves, which is more resilient. The UHK 60 v1 should also be affected, but to a lesser extent, probably because it draws less power.
