Software

The newer USB microcontroller used in the James Donkey RS2 3.0 brings software support with it and the drivers can be found on this page. These are specific to this keyboard and are named accordingly so there is no confusion despite the files being in Chinese. You will find a file in the compressed folder called RGB but that is just a firmware update tool and you can ignore it too given this functionality is built into the software. The installer itself—version 1.0 at the time of testing—is 5 MB in size and installation is trivial as seen above. After installation, the drivers take up only 13.5 MB of space and are very light on system resources.


The software drivers open up with a blacked out render of the keyboard if the device is not connected to the system. When you do connect it, the keyboard render lights up which is a neat way to show the connection is active. I will give compliments to James Donkey here on working with the OEM and putting out a more polished user experience than many of its direct competitors. The program scales nicely with monitor resolution and OS scaling, everything has helpful cues when you hover the mouse cursor over it, and the various buttons are logically placed. The only thing I'd have changed is making better use of space currently allocated for configurations (profiles) and maybe also combine all the lighting options into a single menu.

The video goes over the various functions present in the software drivers for the RS2 3.0. I will mention that the program defaulted to Chinese when installed and I went to the settings menu to thankfully find a language selector that worked well. Here is also where you can check for any firmware updates or reset the keyboard to its default settings. The main menu allows you to create software profiles although they can't be associated with other programs so as to automatically pull them up when the other program launches. You will need to do that via layers on the keyboard itself and key assignment is easily done with the plethora of options provided. The lighting effects are split into multiple menus but the gist is that you get to customize the LEDs as per pre-programmed static, dynamic, or reactive typing effects or even go with per-key lighting that you can even stack, similar to mainstream keyboard solutions. I wish the on-screen keyboard lit up consistently to show you what the various effects were but you can also just look down at the keyboard itself—I got it to do so a few times but not every time, perhaps a bug? The macro recorder and editor works as expected and then we get to the display screen where you can add GIFs or texts to display. It's a simplified version of other such implementations but perhaps for the best in that you don't have a steep learning curve either.