Today at lunch I somehow found myself troubleshooting an intermittent issue with my CTRL keyboard repeating certain letters, usually the E key. This led me to a possible solution: update the firmware. Or more properly, flash the default firmware again.
I downloaded the appropriate files, ran the command and the LEDs on the keyboard turned off, as expected, the command reported Success! as expected, but then nothing else happened. The LEDS never came back on. I tried repeating the steps. I tried resetting the keyboard using a pin in the tiny hole on the bottom of the keyboard where the reset button lives. Nothing.
I then put it aside and started hunting for a replacement keyboard as my current setup really needs a backlit keyboard and none of my other thousand keyboards feature backlighting.
Tonight, I decided to try reviving the keyboard again. More failure followed. I pressed on, though, out of stubbornness or insanity. I decided to download the default firmware file again and it was then I noticed that somehow, I had not been using the default file. How this happened I can’t say. But I followed the steps with the fresh copy of the firmware, and it worked exactly as expected, allowing me to type this post.
I was already wound up over YASUUPSD (Yet Another Screwed Up UPS Delivery), so I suspect that played a factor.
I’m also reading A Complaint-Free World again to help keep my brain calm and relatively happy. We’ll see how that goes.
For now, I’m happy to have my zombie keyboard return to the land of the living.
As a footnote, I’m still looking for another keyboard, so I can have at least a backlit replacement ready to go in case the CTRL keyboard gets accidently tossed into a cement mixer or something.
