Important Notice: You have to update your device’s firmware if you purchased your device before 6th October 2016 for Arbites Innova 2 to work properly, using Arbites Innova 2 on a device with the older firmware will not work.

Diverge, Diverge TM, Terminus Series Firmware Update Guide

Terminus Mini, Felix Firmware Update Guide

Summary

Yay! Finally, after such long waits, Arbites and Animus Innova 2 are finally out. This update does not seem much but a lot of the underlying code on both Animus and Arbites were refactored, you could get the new copy of Arbites over here (Guide also included). Right now only the Windows versions are up but I’ll also post the Linux and Mac versions (gtk2/3 and cocoa respectively) over the weekend once I’ve made sure they are bug free.

The new version of Arbites finally adds multi-language support, I haven’t have time to set up the other languages but the capability is there (see arbites/input-method), as far as I know, this makes Arbites the first key remapper tool with a configurable input method, other tools always assume that the user utilises the US input method.

Macro editing is finally in the thing, I gotta say the macro editing capability is working like a charm.

I’ll have some more detailed info below.

Usage Guides for the new Arbites: (Seriously, you will need to read it)

Getting Started with Arbites

Rebinding Keys with Arbites

Editing Macros with Arbites

Technical Talk on Animus

The older version of Animus stores its layout by ASCII code (97 dec is “a”), the new version of Animus stores its layout by HID scancode (4 dec is “a”), this means that the older version of Arbites will not work with the newer version of Animus and vice versa, I would really love to avoid reverse/compatibility issues but this is really something that I wish I’ve done sooner.

The older version uses ASCII codes because Animus’ base code heavily utilises the Arduino libraries, and part of it was using Arduino’s implementation of the HID keyboard, which means the older version of Animus grandfathered the ASCII code storage. This is fine if we could just settle for supporting only US ASCII on the editor, but I’d really like to get multi-language support working, so the HID module was rewritten and standard HID scancodes are used instead.

The implementation of macros in Animus is of course, hardware based, but editable via software, (see the Editing Macros Guide for more details) this means you could configure your macros on a machine with Arbites, then you could bring your keyboard anywhere and the macros would still work on any machine.

About the expand-ability and future of Animus and Arbites

If you have been looking at some of my code, you will realise that Arbites has always been playing the catch up game with Animus, Animus has a lot of capabilities which can be tapped into, but Arbites was never able to fully utilise Animus, for example, the macros and dual roles modules for Animus has been done for over 3 months already (you could check the github commits), but there was no easy way to configure the macros other than manually sending a serial command containing hex code. Now Arbites is finally catching up, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Arbites at its current state is still not complete, like previously mentioned, the capability for additional language support is already there, but I haven’t got any time to create the alternate input methods (such as swedish/nordic/german/british/etc) since each set of language has over 1400 entries that I have to manually edit (which is extremely tedious), the key menu is also not completely filled, in the key menu, you will notice that the tabs “ctrl’d”/”alt’d”/”shifted” exists, but tabs for a combination of those keys still do not, the capability is already there in Animus (so no further firmware upgrade in the future is necessary), but I haven’t set it up in Arbites.

I was going to also sort out the aforementioned features first before releasing but I figured you guys have waited long enough, so I’ll push out the upgrade progressively.

I’ll also make a batch update post in a few minutes, there’s so much to say but for some reason I am finding it quite difficult expressing myself. (heh, I’m probably just tired because its 5:19 AM and I slept for only 2 hours ~20 hours ago)