Keyboard backlight: two levels on Fn + Space
The keyboard backlight has two brightness levels toggled with Fn + Space; on early keyboards the first level did nothing until the stock firmware was updated.
What it takes
- Software only
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
Asked in July 2023 whether the keyboard was backlit at all, the thread settled the basics: Fn + Space cycles through two brightness levels, and the light is uneven by design — some keys (A, G, J, 7, 9) sit right over an LED while the modifiers barely glow. A firmware bug in pre-update keyboards made the first level do nothing; flashing the current stock firmware from the ClockworkPi repo fixes it.
For more, the keyboard diffuser entry deals with the unevenness and ClusterM's HAL firmware adds an auto-dimming timeout.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
The 0.1 mm diffuser film dims the backlight; pulling it out brightens the keys, and beams' printed 95A TPU diffuser evens the light and lightens the key feel.
Open-source QMK port of the keyboard firmware: Select + ball scrolls, Fn + G game mode, precision mode, tap-hold keys and a web tester, flashed over USB.
lululvlv's replacement keyboard puts a BlackBerry 9900 optical trackpad where the ball was and runs ZMK; sold on Tindie and hack2you.tech since late 2025.
ClockworkPi's flash tool updates the keyboard's STM32 over the internal USB with dfu-util, no disassembly; the UART route and the S1 pads recover a bricked one.
A modified build of ClockworkPi's own Arduino firmware: QMK-like trackball smoothing and Select + ball scrolling without QMK's USB power quirks.
A clean rewrite of the stock keyboard firmware on STM32 HAL: ten switchable layers, a better trackball curve with inertia, Fn lock and auto-dimming backlight.