Driver

Ducky provides an executable file to manually check and update the firmware, which can be found on this page, and the latest firmware for the Shine 6 fixes a bug wherein Windows media keys could not be recorded or assigned as a function to other keys.


The Shine 6 (in all its various versions) is the first Ducky keyboard to get a software driver as well, which has a generic name, Ducky Software Controller (Shine). The latest version (V1.08 at the time of this review) can be downloaded from this page. The installer takes up 22.4 MB of space, and as seen above, installation is very simple. One thing missing is a Terms of Service agreement, and it would be good to see this added sooner rather than later. The final install takes up just 32.5 MB on your hard drive and is extremely light on system resources.


The driver scales well with high DPI displays, although I had to restart my PC to get it to not be absolutely massive in size either. Once done, it was a treat to work with, and despite small English errors, the user experience was pretty good and on par with most drivers today, let alone first-time drivers. However, the colors chosen are dark throughout and could benefit from a touch up in my opinion.

Before we delve any further, I will point out that this driver was designed for just LED control. Do not expect functional controls here, including key assignment and macros. You will still have to rely on on-board controls for that, and perhaps this is something Ducky would like to get feedback on—if you want to see them integrate more options in their driver, share your thoughts in the comments section. As it is, the driver for the Shine 6 has three menus, including an "About" page that just shows you the firmware and software driver version, along with a link to the website. The first menu, entitled LED, is where the bulk of the action is. There are multiple lighting modes to select from a drop-down menu, with sub-options coming up in the middle and an R/G/B channel selector for the specific color among the 16.8 M options available as well. These lighting modes include static, dynamic, and type-responsive modes, as well as some you can add to the list and even combine in "Multi Mode". You can save these to profiles, as well as have two separate sets of zone lighting customization for WASD and the arrow keys, or use a full keyboard color palette.

The middle menu is called LED Profile, and here, you can import and export up to six different profiles. Each profile can be renamed and associated with lighting modes from the previous menu. Here is also where you can quickly reset the keyboard's lighting back to its factory default if you made a mistake and want to start over.