I absolutely love my new Voyager. This is my first ZSA board and between the awesome staff, polished configuration of Oryx and the superb build quality of the board, I have zero regrets about my purchase.
I have fallen down the layout configuration spiral changing things to suit my needs and comfort - adding home row mods (which are totally game changing for me) and adjusting timings to deal with roll as well as combinations that make my working life easier, I can report that I feel pretty darn productive.
This board is also my first choc and hot-swap… I bought some Sunsets this morning from lowprokb.ca - I’m excited to see what a lighter switch does for me.
Just excited to share my experience with community.
Oryx is not open source. Their firmware is a fork of QMK modified for Oryx; I don’t think it’s compatible with the QMK tools.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, if ZSA goes out of business and the Oryx configurator goes down, you’re forever stuck with whatever configs you’ve already downloaded - your keyboard becomes, essentially, a dumb keyboard.
Does it help if their qmk firmware is open source? Not an expert on qmk but I thought it should be enough if they go out of business
That’s not an issue, I think; I’m just not certain how much their forked QMK diverges from the base, and if they’ve added features that are only programmable with Oryx or Keymapp (also closed-source). The fact that the flashing tool, wally, is open-source, but everything else is closed, makes me think there are some proprietary changes in their fork that can’t be configured with the QMK tools. But I don’t know.
I bought the Ergodox because I’m neither knowledgeable nor interested in getting into the firmware and custom soldering level of mechanical keyboards. So I’m making a lot of educated guesses which could be totally off. ¯\(ツ)/¯
All of ZSA’s stuff is QMK-compatible. Just load up a QMK config.
That’s great to know, thanks! It’s all a bit past my knowledge event horizon, but with the verbiage on their website it’s hard to tell where they draw the line on closed/open source, and just how much their fork of QMK diverges. Is it 100% feature compatible, or are there ZSA features that can’t be programmed with QMK? Like the glow features - that seems to be pretty common nowadays, but macros? All of the double-tap-hold, multiple function programmability? Are there features that are custom to the fork that are only programmable with Oryx? Their website seems to indicate that there are, and this is how they stay profitable.
I think it’s more likely that their firmware is a closer to subset of QMK, because it’s hard to represent everything you can do in code with a GUI.
Features like macros and double tap and hold were in QMK first.