I own 4 NerD60 boards, different revisions/editions. I've had the chance to play with various 60% PCB's and NerD60 are the best in my opinion. The only thing that always bothered me was the firmware. Programming is supported only on Windows, the board is known to sometimes cause crashes on Mac, sometimes there is a lag when using the board on Mac, the board is not recognized in BIOS/GRUB (depending on firmware version the behavior is different).
The controller is atmega32u4 , that means it is supported by some of the Open Source firmware projects. The first conversion I am aware of was done by xauser, he also has created the nerd branch in TMK. Knowing that this can be done I have started to experiment myself, little was documented(close to nothing) so I had to learn a lot of things until I was able to make this mod.
Because I wanted to share my experience with other users I have created a guide on how to make this mod, you can find it here :
https://deskthority.net/wiki/Converting_NerD60_to_TMK So far I have tested it on v1.6,v2.0,v2.1 versions of the NerD60 PCB with success, have also reports from other users that it works without any issues (or at least big ones
) .
Now to the scope of this thread, so far the only confirmed working alternate firmware is TMK, you have backlight support, underlight support but with some limitations (no way to modify the light intensity, no breathing lights). I would like to extend the support for this board, have new features implemented, maybe even BT working. QMK firmware has a lot of features related to lights so I think this would be a great point to start, I will try my best to start this port but I hope to get more people involved, I know there are quite a few NerD boards in the wild
