Getting Started

What is Lokey?

Lokey is a framework for developing firmware for a variety of input devices.

Keyboards, mice, and MIDI controllers are supported out of the box, but the framework can also be extended to other kinds of input devices.

Lokey is written in Rust and built on top of Embassy. It is designed to be modular, so you can combine features and adapt them to different hardware targets. It also aims to keep APIs user-friendly, making firmware code easier to build and maintain.

Overview

Before starting to work with the lokey framework, it is important to understand how the crates are structured.

• Core crate

  The core crate lokey is used as a dependency for all other crates in the framework. It contains functionality and abstraction layers that are useful to different kinds of input devices, such as Components, Transports, States, and more.

• Feature crates

  Feature crates provide specific functionality or a related group of capabilities. These crates are named lokey-<feature>.

  EXAMPLES

  • The lokey-usb crate contains an external transport for sending messages over USB.
  • The lokey-nrf crate adds support for the nRF series of microcontrollers.
  • The lokey-keyboard crate contains implementations for key scanning, keyboard layouts, and other keyboard-related features.
  • The lokey-layer crate contains functionality for managing layers.

• Device crates

  Device crates add support for a specific device or a group of devices. These crates are named lokey-device-<device_name>.

  EXAMPLES

  • A crate lokey-device-corne would add support for the Corne keyboard by defining a device type (or two, since it is a split keyboard) and implementing the relevant keyboard components (e.g. by specifying which keys are connected to which pins of the microcontroller).

• Binary crates

  Binary crates are used to build the firmware for a concrete device setup, pulling together the chosen components, device definitions, and configuration settings. The name of these crates does not matter because they usually only contain personalized settings such as keyboard layouts and therefore should not be uploaded to crates.io. Unlike the previously mentioned crate types, these crates are not libraries.

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Rust version

Currently a nightly version of Rust is required. The rust code doesn't actually use any nightly features, but the nightly cargo feature "per-package-target" is used.