Driver

The open-source nature of the Input Club Kira means that anyone can program a driver or configurator to make full use of the hardware. This also means had the company decided to do nothing, this section could have very likely ended without anything of note being discussed. As it turns out, there already are tools from similar but prior keyboard implementations that are directly compatible with the functionality of the Kira. For example, the online manual directs you to monitor Github, where there have been consistent, regular updates to multiple tools already. The Kiibohd (get it?) Configurator is by far the most complete, and the one currently endorsed by Input Club because it is effectively handled by one of them anyway (Jacob Alexander, more popularly known by his online moniker HaaTa). Kiibohd version 0.60 is a pre-release for the Kira, which is still not publicly available at the time of review, and installation is extremely simple while still involving two separate installers. The installer is 83 MB in size, and the installed version takes up 193 MB in Windows, and there are versions for MacOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distros as well.


Opening the program with the keyboard connected pulls up a list of supported keyboards, and the Kira gets a green dot next to its name to show that the connection has been recognized. Clicking on the Kira image or name brings up its keyboard-specific window with more options for customization.

The pre-release version of the Kiibohd Configurator allows for complete key assignment already, be it for the base layer or any of the other seven layers you can customize to your heart's desire by picking from a massive list of preset options. This is a completely open-source configurator, so you can also program in anything you want, ranging from the base code to the GUI itself. Input Club tells me there is another update coming before retail availability that adds software LED lighting control in addition to the various onboard hardware controls.

At this point, you might ask why I did not wait for the release version of the configurator, and the answer is that the availability of multiple different tools from various people makes this section extremely hard to cover at any time. Take this guy, for example, who added some fantastic per-key lighting animations—including a game of Tetris—to the base keyboard language layout (KLL) users can then port over to any compatible keyboard. The Kira especially will benefit from this given the whole theme of light going on here. Then, there is also the Input Club online configurator, which has not yet added the Kira, but allows for a web-based key-assignment program.

Regardless of what you end up doing, the eventual step is to finalize your customization, download the firmware, and hit R.Shift + R.Control + Escape in unison to enter flash mode (or the flash button on the back) and flash the firmware to the keyboard. Hitting Escape again exits flash mode, and a collection of all their firmware versions is available if you wish to go back to the default or try out something from others. The online manual has an entire section dedicated to the Kiibohd Configurator for when you want to make the most of what it has available, and it also hints at the upcoming LED controls.