Preparing Akko keyboard for myself

At the end of the year I ordered an Akko keyboard “5108 B” 100% keyboard. It arrived with 3 weeks despite it being end of the year (top season for delivery guys). The keyboard was in 50% diascount and with free shipping, so I only paid around 70€ for it. I consider this a steam since keyboards with similar features cost easily around 200€ (check the Ducky keyboards of which I think Akko is a clone).

Switches

I got the “Akko V3 Cream Blue Pro” tactile switches, they feel nice (for now after few minutes of using them). The switches are hot-swapable which is great for repairing or testing new and different switches.

Construction

The keyboard supports bluetooth, usb and 2.4 GHz radio connection (with a usb dongle). I only care about the usb connection, so anything else is a waste for me. To facilitate the wireless modes the keyboard contains 3000mAh lithium battery. I decided to see how hard it is to remove the battery. There is a guide to change the battery on other Akko keyboard on iFixIt website, I followed it and it was very similar (different keyboards, but same steps and things to worry about).

Akko gets full points from me when it comes to the construction and repairability in the future. While it takes some fighting to open the keyboard and the battery is glued in place, both usb connector and battery are internally connected via cables and connectors (this is awesome). So I disconnected the battery and taken it out, everything works fine and the only difference which I can see right now is that the battery status LED (oh, those LEDs are shiny) blinks each few seconds, before it was shining all the time. I placed a black tape over this misbehaving LED.

Backlight

The supplied key-caps do not have transparent letters, so the backlight is only around the keys. This is a missed opportunity in my eyes. Since I had my old keyboard which had transparent key-caps I swapped them, now it looks great.

Backlight Control

EDIT It turns out there is a keyboard shortcut Fn+\ (between Enter and Shift) which cycles through different colors, but this is not mentioned in the manual for this exact keyboard, but it is mentioned for some of the other keyboards Akko makes. This is very confusing and this keyboard shortcut should be in the manual (or is it a mercy of a programmer who added it and I should be happy it even exist?).

Original thoughts

It is a total mess from Linux perspective. The keyboard has different preprogrammed effects which can be changed with key shortcurts but none of them is some default stable color (red in my case). It would be awesome to have this preconfigured. On that light I had to get Lose (Windows) 10 in the qemu and install the “driver” there to set the backlight to a fixed color. The settings appear to be saved, so I can live with using the devil once.

Fun fact, if their software could detect the keyboard in Wine it would be awesome. I tried to run it but it could not find the card and was a bit slow to react, but it ran seemingly fine. On the Lose10 on the other hand after installing the software it could not run bacuse some dll was missing and I had to hunt down what it needs on the internet.

It would be much better if Akko provided support for their products in OpenRGB project. That would be awesome and I would not need to fight the software so much.

Key map

This mechanical keyboard with hot-swapable switches has ISO layout. It is hard to find a good keyboard with this layout, almost all of them have the ANSI layout.

There is a small drawback to the key layout which cannot be changed in their software, there is not context menu key and the right Super key cannot be remapped in the keyboard to act like a menu key. A sad thing this is.

Conclusion

It is a nice keyboard which is satisfyingly heavy and nice to use, at least after initial configuration and my little modifications.

NNow this keyboard is truly my own.