Tong Family

I’ve been moving devices off of Bluetooth because of this strange problem with my Shure TWS2 where I get glitching and I have no less than three keyboards each with their 2.4GHz USG-RF dedicated dongle. So I found an old USB 3.0 hub (actually two, one no longer acts as a hub but charges, and on the other one 2 of the 6 ports are broken).

There are two reasons to pick these USB-RF dongles, once theoretical and one practical:

1. Latency. This used to be a bigger deal, but most of these 2.4GHz systems have 1ms latency and much higher bandwidth, so if you are a hard-core gamer, you get a theoretical advantage. For keyboards, it’s hard to see someone spamming a key at 1ms, but I’m sure some folks can 😉 This by the way has largely been fixed if you have a new Bluetooth 5.2 transmitter and receiver.
2. Bluetooth unreliability. This is harder to explain, but with many Bluetooth devices, I’m finding that pairing gets funky (at least on MacOS Sonoma). I have no less than 20 devices and the keyboards in particular get a little crazy. Plus there is that interference problem

Practically, don’t lose that dongle, it’s paired with the keyboard and I’m not sure how to change it. In that way, it is really like a cable. Also, most of these dongles are USB A, but come with USB C adapters. And, you have to find a way to connect them. But for me, I have the dongles anyway and the reliability thing is kind of a problem, so might as well use those dongles that they gave me for free 🙂

NuPhy Gem-80 Keys and Light Meaning

On the Keychron Q1 Max, it’s pretty simple, the switch has three. ways: off, 2.4GHz and, Bluetooth, but with the NuPhy, it only has off, wired USB and, wireless (both USB RF and Bluetooth).

Turns out after some hunting for the NuPhy manual, that you have to use one of the many hot-keys to make this work. A summary, the FN key is on the main keyboard and is at the bottom row, second from the right and there are sea of things that you can do. and you can also use VIA Keymap configurator to really change your brain 🙂

Changing from Bluetooth to 2.4GHz USB-RF

FN 1, 2, 3 and 4. This lets you have three Bluetooth devices and you can switch them and FN-4 turns on the 2.4GHz wireless. I’m definitely not going to remember that!

RGB Light Bar (aka Sidelight)

At the top-left, there is a multi-color LED called the RGB Light bar. By default it is doing a light show, but you can change it with a bunch of special keys. There is no way that I’ll ever remember them, but here they are:

1. Battery Power. If you hit FN- then the LED will show the power reading is Red is ≦20%, Orange is ≦50%, Yellow is ≦80% and Green is ≦1 00%
2. Connection. When you start the keyboard, it will show you how it connected few seconds here yellow is wired mode, blue is Bluetooth and, green is 2.5Ghz
3. Sleep mode. If you hit FN-], then it will change the sleep mode, so green for sleep mode on, and red for sleep mode off. Sleep mode turns the keyboard off after six seconds of no typing.
4. Windows vs Mac mode. This is driven by a switch below and to right. When you flip it, it will blink three whites if it is Mac mode and 3 blues if it is in Windows mode. This basically flip-flops the Option and Command keys.
5. Factory reset. And if things get really whacked, FN-[ for three seconds will restore to factory defaults.

Lighting Controls Galore

OK, there are so many different lights in the system and ways of changing them uses the same general scheme:

1. FN-⬆️. The Function key is on the last row and is second from the right. This turns up the brightness
2. FN-⬇️. Lower brightness
3. FN-⬅️. Change the lighting effect
4. FN-➡️. Change the color of the effect
5. FN- >. This is the greater than sign and increase the effect speed
6. FN-<. This decreases the effect speed

In addition there are two other lights that use the same keys but and an M and N modifier:

1. Sidelight or RGB Light Bar. When the status stuff isn’t being displayed, you can make this LED change colors, by holdingmodifier M so hold down the three keys all at once, so for instance, FN-M-⬆️ will make it brighter. Note that these are actually pretty hard to hit because at least for the Mac, the FN key is also meaningful and gets sent to the computer sometimes, so I’m not quite sure how. to hit it reliably, but what seems to work is to hit a simple FN key like FN-< and then FN-M seems to work.
2. Nameplate LED. This is in the middle on the right and uses the N modifier, so FN-N-⬆️ makes it brighter

This a whacked number of different settings, but I had to document once I learned them all.