When I handed back my work laptop a few months ago, it occurred to me that I needed a new computer. My 2015 MacBook Air is still going strong but it’s many, many years old, and I knew it would struggle with streaming or playing games. So off I went and merrily started pricing new MacBooks when I suddenly wondered… maybe I don’t actually need a laptop?! It was a strange feeling. But I’ve got the Air and an iPad, and it’s not like I need to do work on the road. So I ended up choosing a Mac mini M2 Pro, and so far I’m really happy* with it.
I realised today though that I needed to update my duckyPad. Many of my shortcuts were related to work and therefore obsolete, and I also noticed that a few macros weren’t working anymore. So I downloaded the latest Mac ARM Configurator app and fired it up. Unfortunately it failed to connect to the duckyPad. Hmmm. I went through the troubleshooting and added some permissions, but that didn’t fix it. I also dug around in the official Discord to see if anybody had similar issues. I figured maybe there was some issue with the latest Macs, so my next approach was to plug it into the old MacBook Air, which still had an old version of the Configurator on it. That’s when I remembered that with the old version, you didn’t connect to the duckyPad directly but instead used an SD card reader. D’oh! As soon as I did that, it told me that my firmware was out-of-date. Makes sense.
I went back to the Mac mini and followed the instructions for updating the firmware, which included using Brew to install a utility. That worked perfectly and I was able to then flash the firmware, and as soon as that happened I was able to directly talk to the duckyPad. Brilliant! I was able to remove all the old work macros, set up some new ones, and fix the old ones. (It turns out that I was using “HOLD” in some of them, which has since been replaced by “EMUK.”) The only challenge is that the Configurator is oddly unresponsive when you’re editing. I had to often click multiple times to get it to register or to change focus. Not sure why that is. It works; it’s just super super slow. When I was done, I hit “Save” and the new config was written to the pad.
And incidentally – there’s a new duckyPad Pro coming! It’s got more keys, and knobs. I don’t really need it, but it looks cool.
* My only complaint about the Mac mini is that without a Mac laptop or keyboard, I don’t have Touch ID. That gets really annoying when typing my long master password into Strongbox. I’ve seen a few folks though that have hacked a standalone Touch ID button though… A project for another time. 🙂