rumcake

A rust-based mechanical keyboard firmware that aims to be decentralized, featureful, and easy to configure.

⚠ rumcake is still a work in progress. Expect some bugs and breaking changes.

• About
• Getting started
  • Minimum Supported Rust Version
• MCUs
  • Tested
  • Planned MCUs for the future
• Features
  • Working
  • Not yet working, WIP
  • Planned
• Why "rumcake"
• Acknowledgements

About

rumcake provides a library for you to build a keyboard firmware, using embassy-rs under the hood. Providing rumcake as a library allows you to build your firmware in your own Cargo workspace, removing the need to push code to the central rumcake repo.

The rumcake library:

• Provides embassy-executor tasks for common keyboard tasks, including matrix polling, host communication, LED rendering, etc.
• Provides macros that allow you to configure your keyboard firmware in an easy-to-understand way. keyberon is also used under the hood for keyboard layout configuration.
• Aims to be platform-agnostic, and uses different HALs (hardware abstraction libraries) under the hood, depending on the chip you decide to build for.

Getting started

The easiest way to get started with rumcake is with the basic rumcake template.

cargo generate --git https://github.com/Univa/rumcake-templates rumcake-basic-template

The template contains a rumcake project that shows you a basic Cargo workspace setup, along with how to configure your keyboard matrix, and layout. The template also contains documentation on how to build and flash your firmware.

To learn how to add extra features to your keyboard, see the templates or refer to the files in ./docs

Minimum Supported Rust Version

rumcake uses some Rust features that are only found on the nightly toolchain. Please use the latest nightly toolchain when compiling your firmware.

MCUs

Note that building and flashing instructions may change depending on the MCU. See the templates for some build and flashing instructions for some common setups.

Tested

• STM32F072CBx
• STM32F303CBx
• nRF52840 (tested with nice!nano v2)

Planned MCUs for the future

• RP-based chips (I don't have access to an RP-based keyboard at the moment)

Features

Working

The following features are working, but may not be stable or has missing components.

• USB host communication
• Bluetooth host communication (only for nRF-based keyboards)
• Backlighting
• Underglow
• Split keyboards over BLE

Not yet working, WIP

• Via/Vial
• EEPROM

Planned

• Media keys
• Displays (e.g. SSD1306)
• Encoders

Why "rumcake"

RUst MeChAnical KEyboard

Acknowledgements

This firmware would not be possible without the work done by other community projects.

A huge thanks goes to the following projects:

• QMK
  • A lot of backlighting and underglow animations have been adapted from QMK.
  • WS2812 Bitbang driver is also loosely based on their implementation.
• ZMK
  • Their existing bluetooth, and split keyboard implementations have been helpful references for rumcake's implementation
• simmsb's corne firmware
  • Very helpful reference for developing a keyboard firmware using embassy-rs
• TeXitoi's keyseebee project
  • Another helpful reference for a rust-based keyboard firmware
• Any dependency used by rumcake. Building this would be a lot more difficult without them!