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#firmware

6 articles tagged #firmware.

Every #firmware piece

A coral sparkline climbing steadily from 40 to 80 across eight data points, plotted against a warm-grey keyboard silhouette with a split spacebar and a tuning knob outlined at its base, and a small warm-bronze theme dot in the upper-right margin.

Hardware caught up to Wooting. Firmware hasn't.

Wooting's 80HE+ preorder is the top mover on thock's 2026-W39 trends tracker, climbing from a score of 40 to 80 over eight weeks. The switch hardware behind it isn't the reason — Hall-effect sensing is table stakes across the category by September 2026. The firmware behind it still isn't matched.

thockSep 19, 20266 min read

A single warm-grey stroke diagram of a key's downward travel plotted as a distance-over-time curve, with a coral line tracking the deepest point reached on each stroke and a stepped bracket marking a reset distance trailing behind that peak, a small warm-bronze theme dot in the upper-right margin.

Deep Dives

Rapid trigger is a firmware algorithm, not a switch spec

A rapid-trigger switch is not a special switch. It is an ordinary analog sensor wired to a polling loop that redraws its own actuation point every cycle — and that loop, not the sensor, is where the real engineering happens.

thockSep 2, 20269 min read

Top-down silhouette of a 75% mechanical keyboard drawn in a single warm-grey stroke on warm paper, with three small ochre callout chips floating above the keys labeled QMK, VIA, and VIAL — each connected by a dashed lead line to a distinct cluster of keys it governs.

Guides

Keyboard firmware, compared: QMK, VIA, and VIAL

A first-time builder finishes a beautiful board, sits down to remap right-shift to enter, and discovers the firmware question is the one nobody warned them about. The catalog has three serious answers and an opinion about each.

thockApr 29, 202611 min read

A keyboard silhouette drawn in warm-grey stroke radiating three signal paths toward a laptop: a solid line for a wired USB-C cable, a short dashed arc to a small USB dongle, and a longer dashed arc reaching directly to the laptop for Bluetooth, with an amber splash marking the dongle as the connection type most likely to go missing.

Guides

Wireless keyboard buying guide: Bluetooth, 2.4GHz, and the latency that actually matters

"Wireless" on a spec sheet hides three different radios with three different latency numbers, battery habits, and ways to lose the thing. Here's how to pick the one that matches an actual desk instead of a marketing slide.

thockSep 11, 20269 min read

Guides

ZMK for wireless and split builds: a practical guide

QMK answers almost every firmware question on a wired board. Add a battery and a second half, and the honest answer changes — this is the guide for the builder standing at that fork.

thockJul 24, 202610 min read

Stylized firmware-stack silhouette rendered as three layered horizontal slabs in 2px warm-grey stroke on a 1200x750 transparent canvas, with a coral wireless-signal arc radiating from the top slab and a warm-bronze board-edge highlight running along the lower edge of the bottom slab — accent dot at the apex of the coral arc.

Trends

ZMK is becoming the wireless default for premium prebuilts

A five-board flagship lineup running ZMK isn't a niche move; it's a market signal that an open-source firmware that lived in DIY-wireless territory for half a decade has crossed into mainstream-prebuilt anchor status. The vendor side has finally caught up with where the cohort already was.

thockApr 15, 20269 min read

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