#Remove requirement to have 4 loaded profiles

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

north gyro
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There is no real reason imo to require having 4 loaded profiles. I have on numerous occasions accidentally switched from one profile to another. I would love to only be able to keep one profile saved on the board.

I have to create copies of the 1 profile I want and anytime I make a change I have to make new copies. It's easy to think you made the change and didn't or made a new copy and didn't. I have to date my profiles and copy versions as a way to make sure everything is organized and I've remade new copies. It all just feels very unnecessary.

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Also odd to me that you can only have 4 profiles, is that memory limited? Seems like a small amount. I am surprised there are users out there that don't require more profiles they can fast switch between.

limber jay
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theres a few UX issues with making key binds for what would essentially be unlimited profiles

north gyro
# limber jay theres a few UX issues with making key binds for what would essentially be unlim...

So I assume making only 1 wouldn't be an issue? And what about making it have 8? 4 just feels unnecessarily small. I don't personally use that many but I have a few friends that have quite a few more than 4, usually around 6-8 on QMK firmware boards. I'm not personally affected by it but I can see some power users not buying the boards due to a profile limit, especially with the 80he as that will attract more power users than the 60he (I assume).

austere pier
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flash has wear and tear. pretty sure that 4 profiles was a good compromise of usability/durability of the keyboard. For your specific issue, just have the 4 slots with the same profile. Problem solved
QMK does not have profiles, but rather layers

north gyro
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Why not have 4 notebooks in your backpack instead of 1? You don't need 4 but I'm going to put 4 in there. I listed why it was a pain and an issue and you didn't address that, you just wanted to be combative for some odd reason. Even if flash is a reason, I have to constantly rewrite 4 profiles instead of changing 1. You are correct QMK has layers, I kept the terms the same to simplify.

austere pier
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You misunderstood me. It's the writes that induce wear on flash. Cycling through profiles does not writes to flash. If you create 4 equal profiles you only write 4 times (actually a bit more complex, but I'm simplifying). Toggling through the profiles does not perform any writes (Write Once Read Many). This way you achieve your goal while preserving flash 😉

north gyro
# austere pier You misunderstood me. It's the writes that induce wear on flash. Cycling throug...

I did not misunderstand. I'm not toggling between profiles. Every time I make a change to my profile, my "1 and only" profile I change it. Then I rename it to have the current date. I then create a 3 copies and put a version number label on each. I do this because of the 4 profile requirement. If you don't do this is can be easy to make a change or think you made a change to a profile and didn't. It also helps keep track of which one of the copies is which because I have had issues with the drag n drop functionality in the past. I then drag each of these to the profiles on the keyboard. So each and every time I am making a single profile change, I am writing at least 3 new profiles to the keyboard.

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And to add on to that, your argument doesn't make a ton of sense to me if I'm being honest and maybe I'm not understanding how it works BUT. Lets say you want to have 6 profiles, So now you are loading and unloading profiles when you want to use them. Wouldn't that be writing to the keyboard far more times that just allowing 6 profiles or 8 profiles?

austere pier
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Go to your profile 1 , Layer 2 and remove these bindings:

image.png
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Problem solved! 🙂

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This way, you will never be able to switch to the other (onboard) profiles

north gyro
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Sure you can do that and I have since long ago done that, but there is no reason not to have the option to only have one. I'm confused as to why you are determined about this. I mean I know why but it's fine.

austere pier
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I am looking at this empirically from an embedded design view. I dont work for Wooting 🙂

north gyro
rose inlet
keen ore
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I would love to be able to only use 2 profiles

Having a maximum makes sense to me but a minimum being above 1 is kinda silly

austere pier
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If this is not the case, something's off

north gyro
# austere pier If this is not the case, something's off

I'm going to be honest with you. There is no real reason that I can conceive of to limit it to 4 forced profiles. It doesn't matter if there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, it doesn't make sense. If anyone new is using the UI they would expect to see a garbage can icon on the right to delete a profile, to be able to drag it off and delete it or to be able to right click and delete it. These are expected actions based on the UI of almost every program even remotely similar on the phone, on a pc on whatever. It's just the expected way it would work.

I'm not a coder, I'm not a developer. I don't know what it would take to be able to limit it but I would make a small guess that it isn't that great of a request. I could see how asking for more profile is more work. How much I have no idea.

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The UI should work how a user expects it to work and it should be self explanatory. Not being able to delete or drag a profile off is an unexpected behavior and is not intuitive. It's not about if it works as is or not.

austere pier
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It's not about the UI, or any web implementation. It's about byte range and wear leveling on the flash. If not carefully designed can wear the flash very quickly. It's not an infinite resource 🙂

Most flash chips have about 1 million writes MTBF. It can wear down fast

Most embedded engineers oversize them specifically for this purpose. Not to have a lot of storage, but to increase the life span of the chip...

vernal wolf
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The storage doesn’t have to be empty to write a new profile to it, just “forgotten”. So the profile still exists but not for the user to access.

austere pier
north gyro
austere pier
north gyro
rose inlet
austere pier
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Consider studying embedded design. We are going down the rabbit hole here

steep violet
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I write my own keyboard firmware by hand in C, and can tell that you’re just being argumentative to be argumentative tbh. There’s no reason not to allow a variable number of software profiles 1-4 or even 1-8. And if I decide that for my personal workflows I need 8 layer profiles, it’s because I need 8 layer profiles, and I’ll accept the expectation that I’m wearing my flash ~8 times faster than a person with 1 profile. Just like a person using all 4 profiles can expect they’re writing bits about 4x more often than a person who only desires 1.

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But also, if I write 8 profiles and don’t change them more than once a year or two, how am I doing anything destructive to my flash over say, a person with 2 profiles who tinkers with them a lot. By your logic, Wooting should rate limit how often a user can alter a profile too.

vernal wolf
steep violet
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Yeah I don't think their argument holds much water. Maybe there's some more details they're leaving unwritten, and maybe they're actually a really smart person who knows what they're talking about. But the information they've put in this thread doesn't tell that story.

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They’re correct that flash storage has a certain number of expected bytes written to it tied to its expected lifespan. But they haven’t really thought their whole argument through imo, and just continuing to argue the same point because the OP doesn’t have a background in embedded software to dispute him.

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Even if we were concerned about flash storage failures here, there are things you can do as a business to inform users that what they’re doing could shorten their product’s lives. Like after a 6th profile is created, raise a notification that more profiles causes more writes to storage which could shorten its life, and let the user decide how much that matters to them. Some people will just buy a new Wooting keyboard when theirs breaks if they liked this one, understood the tradeoff for more profiles, and accepted it.

vernal wolf