Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

OK, here is what they don’t tell you about pairing an AnnePro v2. The manual says that you should press the FN2 and then either the numerals 1, 2, 3 or 4 to get up to four bluetooth connections to any keyboard, but they are super unclear how to get it to work.

From Reddit, there are all kinds of things to try but the undocumented things are:

1. If you want to start pairing, there is a difference between a short press of FN+{1, 2, 3 or 4} which changes the Bluetooth and a long press. A short tap will lead to a single slow green flash. This means that it is now working on that pairing
2. If you press and hold, then you will get a slow flashing green which means it is looking for a pairing for the connection number.
3. If you long press and hold, eventually that slow flash will turn to a quick flash and this means it is in pairing mode.

They don’t really document this so I spent a day trying to get this to work. Also on at least on of my Macs, it kept reporting the wrong name, macOS Big Sur though it was an iPhone although it had a keyboard icon.

The second undocumented thing is that the name of the keyboard (I’ve never seen this before) changes based on the connection, so you will get AnnePro2 P1 if it is on FN2+1 and P2 for FN2+2 and so forth. This is a hint to you when you can’t get the pairing that the device may be on the wrong Bluetooth connection. And, yes it would really be helpful if did switch between devices automagically like the Apple hardware. Sigh.

Resetting Bluetooth and other things

It took me a long time to get it to work, but here are the things to try to basically reset the entire world:

1. Shift+Option click on the Bluetooth icon will get you into detailed diagnostics on the Mac. You can do this from the Bluetooth icon on the upper right or from the Control Center, if you Shift+Option click on the Bluetooth you get to the same menu, you can see the signal strengths of each collection for example.
2. When you are in this menu, you can do increasingly drastic things from Reset the Bluetooth module, to reset all Apple devices to remove all devices from Bluetooth. So try that if you can’t connected.
3. The most drastic thing to do is to do an SMC reset, which you get to by turning the Mac off and then holding left side Ctrl-Command-Option down and the power switch. You also try a PRAM/NVRAM reset while you are at it, with the left side Command-Option and then holding down the P and R keys while pressing power.
4. Finally, you can reset your Obins AnnePro v2 as well, turning the keyboard on and off three times is supposed to do that.
5. You can also connect a USB C cable to your computer and then load brew install obinskit and this will get you their control software. You can then clear the Bluetooth Bind (that means get rid of the pairings) and reset the keyboard to factory settings.
6. As an aside I have two of these one is a Gateron Blue and the other a Gateron Brown (clicky and silent), so to remember which is which I set the backlight to blue and brown respectively. Or if you want to be fancy, you can to to Lighting Profiles and choose breathing per key which basically flashes on every key you type. I also like Poptang which does a vertical and horizontal coloring for fun.
7. Note that when you connect your USB C cable, you can see the control center, but you are still Bluetooth connected to go to full USB only, the switch on the bottom will turn Bluetooth off on the keyboard
8. One thing that did not work was doing to /Users/<your user name>/Library/Preferences and looking for a non existent com.apple.Bluetooth.plist which is the preference list, it must have moved somewhere else with Big Sur.

Pairing can fail multiple times and take a long time to show

I don’t completely understand the Bluetooth protocol, but with both the AnnePro v2 and the Corsair Dark Core RGB, many times the devices do not show up when you pair them. And when you try to connect it will fail.

I haven’t seen any rhyme or reason to this and the solution is to just keep trying. It normally takes me between 2 to 10 times of holding down the FN2+1 or instance and then doing the Bluetooth discovery for it to work. It will say connecting for a long time and then fail and then mysteriously work. Sigh, the joys of Bluetooth interoperability.

Keyboard Magic

OK, the AnnePro v2 has no less than four different modes on the keyboard depending on whether you just type, you have the FN1 key down, the FN2 key, or quickly tap on the keys.

1. With the so called default, you can go to the Obinskit application and plug your USB C keyboard in and then you should see it. Then you can click on home and choose Layout, then the options are QWERTY which is for Windows and then Mac which swaps the Command and Option keys.
2. If you click on the FN1 tab, you can what happens when you hold the FN1 key. The keyboard has on the side of the keys cleverly the left side what the defaults are. In this case holding FN1 when pressing escaped gives you a tilde and any of the number keys are then the function keys 1 through 12. Finally you get arrow kesy at b oth the WASD and also IJKL (the later are the default Vim settings), plus you get over on the right the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down and Ins and DEL.
3. On the FN2 tab, you will see what happens there. These are mainly control keys for the keyboard. We’ve already talked about Short press FN2 and 1 through 4 (which moves you to a new Bluetooth connection) and long press to quick flash and go into pairing mode. But, it also has the same default WASD and IJKL keys so you can hit either FN1 or FN2 to get there. But, the best is FN2-9 let’s you go through all the lighting you can selec the Obinskit Lighting section (make sure to hit Download after you modify it), then FN2-9 takes you through all of them. And FN2-10 turns backlighting on and off (you might want off to save power) and FN2-11 and FN2-12 turn the backlight on lower or higher