Out of the box, all kits of ANAVI Macro Pad 8 are powered by the popular open source QMK firmware.

QMK stands for Quantum Mechanical Keyboard and it is an open source community centered around developing various computer input devices. The project is hosted in GitHub. More than 1700 developers contributed to this open source firmware over the years. QMK supports more than 2000 keyboards and keypads brands.

Although QMK is very powerful and flexible, it might be a challenge to get used to it if you haven’t used it before. Over the next weeks and months, as part of efforts for increasing the documentation related to ANAVI Macro Pad 8, we will be rolling out updates related to QMK.

QMK offers several options to select, customize and flash a keymap for your keyboard:

• Command-line interface - advanced but not very user friendly
• QMK Toolbox - application for MacOS and Windows users
• QMK Configurator - an online tool used for easily creating firmware files for keyboards supported by QMK.

You can use QMK on MS Windows, MacOS and GNU/Linux distributions. To get started with the QMK firmware please explore this tutorial from the official documentation and install all required software suitable for the operating system on your PC.

Keymaps for ANAVI Macro Pad 8

The QMK source code for ANAVI Macro Pad 8 is available as part of the main repository in GitHub. So far there are 5 keymaps available:

• Default - with 2 layers for demo purposes
• KiCad - free software suite for electronic design automation which as used to design ANAVI Macro Pad 8,
• Kodi - for the free and open source media player application,
• OBS - for the popular open source video recording and live streaming software,
• Zoom - for the popular video communication software.

Over the time we plan to extend the list with keymaps for other popular software applications. Please feel free to submit your favorite keymaps for ANAVI Macro Pad 8 to the QMK repository in GitHub!

Compile QMK for ANAVI Macro Pad 8

After installing QMK software on your computer, from the command line you can compile QMK firmware with the default keymap for ANAVI Macro Pad 8 using the following command:

qmk compile -kb anavi/macropad8 -km default

Flash QMK on ANAVI Macro Pad 8

Follow the steps below to flash the compiled QMK firmware to ANAVI Macro Pad 8:

• Connect ANAVI Macro Pad 8 to your personal computer with USB to micro USB cable
• Execute the following command in a terminal to flash the default keymap:

qmk flash -kb anavi/macropad8 -km default

• Press the RESET button on ANAVI Macro Pad 8 when asked:

Detecting USB port, reset your controller now.....

• Wait until the firmware flashes successfully:

avrdude done.  Thank you.

As you know from a previous update, the heart of ANAVI Macro Pad 8 is Microchip ATmega32U4. It is an 8-bit microcontroller part of the AVR family. QMK uses avrdude as a utility to download, upload and manipulate the firmware of these microcontroller.

Thank you again for supporting and using ANAVI Macro Pad 8. Stay tuned for more updates and tutorials!

Thanks, Leon