Meeting Notes (2020 04 21)

Would like to better handle differences in key presses when holding down a button, repeating keystrokes.
General discussion on the different types of keyboard animations, trying to come to a better understanding of what a more general animation library should look like. Time-based and reactive animations.
Multiple keybows or keyboards connected together into a cluster, being managed by a single animation compositor. Virtual UI for building and testing different keyboard layouts and configurations.
Discussion on feasibility of using OpenGL, maybe via scenic, for managing the canvas that keys are mapped against.
Discussion of PR #12. Seems like a good improvement so far. Will need to take many steps to eventually get to the final design.
Short walkthrough of how QMK stores its configuration for keyboards.
Discuss next steps to automate the nerves base image to include upstream changes.

Action Items

Alex to add the any_color type to PR #12 and merge.
Chris to perform the renaming for issue #10, including nerves_system_kebow and releasing an updated Nerves artifact.

The following notes are from our keyboard demo by Chris

Types of animations
- Slow color scroll left to right
- Need to separate the animation position from the LED position
  - A full size keyboard (not Keybow) has keys offset but the animation looks fluid (not jagged diagonal)
  - Currently run off the tick/speed context - can compute next pixel state from this
  - Slow down/speed up with key sequence
  - Change hue/saturation
- What it doesn’t do yet:
  - Randomly switch the color of one key
  - “Reactive animations” - When you press a key and it triggers an animation on that key or series of keys
  - Heat map animation - The more you press certain keys the more they’re affected by the animation (light lingers around, changes hue, etc.)
Keyboards can come with light maps of which keys are alpha keys and which are modifiers
Keyboards come in lots of weird shapes (split, ergonomic), and QMK can support them
Intention to support more than just Keybow -> full keyboard with RGB matrix
Virtual rendering of animations (live view, scenic)
Animation editor software for creating animations
We should pull animations out to a separate library at some point
API - Can affect the animation from things happening elsewhere
Doesn’t need Z axis (i.e. LED cube), targeting a QMK competitor
Kinds of LEDs switches support
- Surface mount w/ cutout in housing
- Sub-surface mount (reverse mount) LEDs
- Switch w/ complete hole on one side of switch, through-hole LEDs

Figuring out hardware. 3 parts: