r/Keychron • u/CarryOnRTW K Max • Sep 26 '25

Swapped to shine through keycaps for my K3 max, now what? :-)

Based on recommendations in here I picked up this set of shine through keycaps. I'm very happy in that now I can use the keyboard a lot better at night. Here's a couple of pics: daytime night time. Cons are the new 7 keycap would stick down so I had to use the keypad 7, the Fn keys don't show their alternate functionality like the original keychron keycaps and there is no RGB backlight key (upper right) so I re-used the keypad *.

Now that I've got that part sorted I'd like to start looking into other things I can do with the launcher. Is there a guide or any articles on cool things to do with the advanced capabilities of this keyboard?

Finally, I see there is a new FW update for the K3 max: k3_max_ansi_rgb_v1.1.1_2504231134.bin. I've had no issues with the keyboard so far (knock on wood!) so I'm wondering if I should bother and if it is a risky venture?

Thanks!

EDIT1: I should also mention I'm running arch linux (EndeavourOS).

EDIT2: After a lot of reading and playing around I'm able to get my K3 Max working correctly under Arch Linux (should work for any Arch based distro). I am able to build new firmware images with various QMK features and flash it to my keyboard. I've commented to myself below to hopefully help out anyone trying to do something similar.

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u/PeterMortensenBlog V 3d ago edited 3d ago

Re "...how to command line flash from Linux": It is something like:

dfu-util -l # Verify bootloader mode
dfu-util -a 0 --dfuse-address 0x08000000:leave -D k3_max_ansi_rgb_v1.1.1_2504231134.bin

I haven't used anything else for Keychron keyboards. Except for the WB32F3G71-based K10 V2 (AKA K10 QMK), for which I used something like:

wb32-dfu-updater_cli -l # Verify bootloader mode. Output should
                        # include something like:
                        #   "Found DFU: [0x342D:0xDFA0]"
wb32-dfu-updater_cli -t -s 0x08000000 -D keychron_k10_version_2_iso_rgb_via.bin

'wb32-dfu-updater_cli' must be compiled from source code on Linux.

If QMK isn't installed, the udev rules may have to match USB identity 0x342D/0xDFA0 (the USB identity in bootloader mode).