I’ve been a UHK 60 v2 user since mid-2023 - it became my go-to keyboard while I was hot desking at my previous job. Last year, I switched over and ended up using it as my daily driver on my desktop PC. I was apprehensive that such a relatively small keyboard would be frustrating to use for some applications - especially games and such.
I got my UHK 80 this week, and I’m immediately struck how thoroughly UHK 60-pilled I’ve become over the last few years - I don’t think I’ve used the Esc key or the new arrow keys once, still resorting to muscle memory and using Mod+Esc and Mod+I, J, K, L respectively. That being said, the build quality is exceptional: it feels incredibly robust while still being quite lightweight. The improvements over the UHK 60 are already proving to be a huge step up, and are speeding up my workflows at home massively.
I did have a few bug bears I wanted to share - it might be that there were some details that I missed as part of the onboarding process, but the product manuals and knowledge base felt a little light on detail regarding some aspects of setting up the hardware.
Wired / dongle setup feels really good, and i’m especially impressed with how incredibly seamless it is jumping between the two setups.
Bluetooth has been more problematic. I had hoped that I might be able to set up the keyboard with my desktop so that it uses bluetooth as its primary connection, which then switches to wired while i’m charging - however, I can’t seem to get the UHK 80 to reliably pair to my desktop.
If I disconnect the usb cable, I can sometimes get “UHK 80 BLE” to appear in the “add a device” menu in Win11 (however, sometimes, it just appears as “Keyboard”, or “UHK 80 Left Half” or similar), but it often errors while trying to connect, both the PC and keyboard sometimes go into the 6-digit code pairing mode - which doesn’t always seem to work, but sometimes just the keyboard goes into the 6-digit code pairing mode and I get no pop-up in windows.
I feel the problem is that I’m simply unsure when the UHK 80 is ready to pair to a new machine - is it possible that i’m missing some kind of functionality that instructs the UHK 80 to enter pairing mode?
When I switch connections, if I press a connection that is not set up (i.e. if I only have connection 0 and connection 1 set, then press Fn2 + I to select connection 2), the keyboard is in a “warning” state with the agent reporting “Invalid host connection index: nr#. Ignoring!”.
Is it possible to “ok” these messages to clear the warning state on the keyboard display? Or do I need to do an off/on with Fn2+Pause, S+F, J+L to clear it?
Setting up the Riser-80 is excruciatingly challenging! Lining up the screws with the base and hoping that they seat inside the golden-coloured nut inside the base of the keyboard (especially the first screw) is a crapshoot at best.
Has there been any consideration to having an extruded section on the bottom side of the riser so that it slots into the holes, and acts as a guide to steer the screw towards the nut?
Purely on an aesthetic level, I was a little disappointed that the left and right sides of the palm rest didn’t match up - with the left half being a more yellowy-brown and a different grain pattern when next to the right hand side.
I don’t think my UHK 60 palm rests lined up exactly, but the variation in the colour and texture appears a lot more prominent on the UHK 80.
For now, I think that’s all I wanted to flag up. Functionality wise, I feel like this is already an excellent upgrade over the UHK 60 - if the next iteration of the UHK 60 features half of the QOL updates that have been included on the UHK 80, sign me up on day one!
I was the same at first, but now I use em both ways. You can always remap all those extras if you want .
BLE is pretty much borked ATM, but they’re working on it. I honestly suggest using the dongle, or USB until they get things straightened out.
It’s super finicky on Windows. You may need to first remove any UHK BLE devices from the Windows device list (not “UHK 80 Left USB” or “UHK 80 Right USB”). Look for “UHK 80” or “UHK 80 Right NUS” and remove those. Rebooting the UHK, and/or toggling the PC’s Bluetooth radio may also be necessary. Also make sure you don’t have set bluetooth.enabled false or set bluetooth.alwaysAdvertiseHid false anywhere.
Then you can try using the bluetooth toggle pair macro. That should make the UHK80 discoverable for two minutes, and reject other known devices long enough to give the desired host a better chance to connect.
This has been improved in recent master branch updates, and will hopefully be in an official release soon. The fix now shows a brief “Unassigned slot” message on the OLED display and dismisses itself. In the meantime, you can use the clearStatus macro to dismiss any warning messages on the OLED (triangle icon), or Agent’s yellow popup messages. Additionally, you can use the printStatus macro to paste the error messages into a text editor, etc.. Once the message is printed, it will clear the error. Helpful for reporting stuff to the devs.
If you ever feel you need to restart the UHK (UHK60 or UHK80), you can use the reboot macro command, or press the “reset” buttons (recessed pinholes) on the underside of each keyboard half. No need to use sleep mode for that.
Well, right, regarding bluetooth, I am not sure if I am the problem, zephyr is the problem or bluetooth is the problem. But yeah . Sorry about that in any case.
I don’t think I’ve ever used a BT device that didn’t go bonkers at least half the time. I don’t know enough about zephyr to have much of an opinion on it. But I do know that you’ve been working super hard, so I respect the hell outta ya for not losing your mind a long time ago . Idk how programmers do it. It’s gotta be rough.
@kareltucek imho, I don’t feel like I overstated enough how the good the current wired / dongle setup is. I used to use an Epomaker TH96 as my daily driver, and swapping between connections was fast, but 2-4 seconds fast. I’m bowled away that swapping on the UHK 80 is essentially totally immediate.
@pcooke9 the clearStatus/printStatus and bluetooth toggle pair macros might be a sensible workaround for the timebeing - that’s a great idea, thank you for the steer!
I was an experimental musician for a long time, so I know how good it feels in those rare moments when someone actually seems to catch a glimmer of what you’ve done. While I’ll never really understand most of the code itself, I can see the soulful artistry behind it. I’ll always appreciate that.
The dudes here have been wonderful to me, and I definitely respect them all. I try my best to repay the kindness they’ve shown me.
I’ll definitely never wrap my head around the HRM stuff, so I don’t have much to say about your work in particular, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. I tried Max’s config for a bit the other day, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more confused .
zephyr is most probably the root cause. Why I’m telling these? I have a preonic keyboard with zmk instead of kaleidoscope and it does kinda same issue, plus crashing keyboard from time to time. Funny enough I have also few nicenano! based keyboards that i’ve built that do not do this. I am assuming nicenano! plays better with zmk …
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. Sorry about that in any case.
. Idk how programmers do it. It’s gotta be rough.
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