Trouble with ZMK Studio

[ebon steeple]

Hello everyone! I designed and built my own keyboard - Quark - about a year ago now. After receiving the pcbs, assembling all of the components, and 3d printing my own case I turned to the firmware section of my build. I chose to work with zmk and sort of hobbled together some code that seems to have done the trick. I recently decided it would be cool to make the keyboard work better for me and part of that mission is getting ZMK Studio to function and smooth out the messy code that I jumbled together. I decided to first tackle ZMK Studio and then clean up my code. However, despite my best attempts I have been thwarted by ZMK Studio, always getting errors every time I push my code to github. Any thoughts as to why my code is not giving errors? Here is a link to my github repo: https://github.com/A-R-R-O-W-s-1/Quark

[plucky surge]

move your build.yaml back out to the location of the original

[ebon steeple]

so back out to the root?

[plucky surge]

yep

[ebon steeple]

ok let me try that

[plucky surge]

be aware of the caveats re: changing your keymap once you flash Studio-compatible firmware

[ebon steeple]

thats good to know

[plucky surge]

lastly

[ebon steeple]

ok that makes sense

[ebon steeple]

Alight nevermind I take back my previous statement. If you need to change the configuration, why does it matter if you do it in the kconfig.defconfig or the .conf file? You have to make another commit anyways right? (Sorry I am new to this and perhaps am overlooking something major haha)

[plucky surge]

If you use boards/shields/SHIELDNAME.conf, those settings can't be overridden easily.
If you're the only one who's ever going to use this keyboard, this doesn't matter as much.
If anyone else might, they're in for a crappy, confusing time when the settings they want don't work. [I just talked to somebody who got bit by this earlier this week](#boards-shields message).

Again, using config/SHIELDNAME.conf is fine.

I should also point out that in your case, since you have a split...boards/shields/SHIELDNAME.conf doesn't even work.

[ebon steeple]

Ah wait so when other people develop keyboards they probably never give others access to the .conf file? So moving the .conf file up a directory gives others access?

[plucky surge]

If anyone else gets your PCB and wants to re-use the work you've done for firmware, they're going to reference your repository as a module in their config/west.yaml.

[ebon steeple]

Oh

ok got it

[plucky surge]

You got it but I was already most of the way through typing so I might as well finish
You can see an example here: https://github.com/sadekbaroudi/zmk-config-fp-example
There are basically no files under boards/shields.
The keyboard definitions live over here in a different repo

[ebon steeple]

Oh this makes so much sense now. I was looking at other peoples repos to see how they configured studio and there were way less files under boards/shields so that connects some dots. Thanks for that bit of info!

@plucky surge Alright so I moved the build.yaml file out to the root directory and pushed the changes. I got a weird error about how a default transform is required, but I thought that it is explicitly stated to not include one for zmk studio. https://zmk.dev/docs/features/studio
https://github.com/A-R-R-O-W-s-1/Quark/actions/runs/16380524540/job/46290864368

[plucky surge]

'transform' is marked as required in 'properties:' in /tmp/zmk-config/zmk/app/dts/bindings/zmk,physical-layout.yaml
You still need to define at least one matrix transform, but it's used by physical-layout https://zmk.dev/docs/development/hardware-integration/physical-layouts

Not in the chosen node