DO52 Pro

I recently got a new keyboard off AliExpress, and been very happy with it! It is sold under the name DO52 Pro. The whole thing cost me only about £90 (about £40 for the keyboard, £20 for the keycaps, £20 for the switches, £5 for the hot-swap sockets and £5 for the batteries). Given it has a trackpoint, I think this is very good value for a mechanical keyboard.

It has quickly become one of my favourite keyboards, I’m using it with an nRF52840 SuperMini with ZMK firmware, OUTEMU half-height switches (full-height Cherry footprint compatible) and XVX wavy pink skyline low-profile keycaps.

I wasn’t able to track down who made it, the DO42 seems to be from https://github.com/brokenax3/do42, the DO52 adds a number row to it but the best I could find for that is this repo https://github.com/Canorus/do42-do52 which is just a fork of the DO42 repo.

Then the difference between the DO52 and the DO52 Pro is the Pro has two D-pads, and the trackpoint below the right homing key, between the h/j/n/m keys. I have images comparing the three variants on the bottom.

See https://github.com/KoviRobi/zmk-config-do52pro for my configuration. I’m liking ZMK currently, the keyboard isn’t set up perfectly yet, but I’m pretty happy with how it is. The biggest issue currently is the trackpoint not working on Android, seems to be that the Android isn’t subscribing to the mouse events. (Edit, issue resolved itself after some pairing/unpairing.)

I have also made some mods to the bootloader, to allow exiting the bootloader using key presses, and also renamed the USB name so they identify which halves they are. To build the bootloader, just use

make BOARD=do52pro LEFT_HALF=1 du-flash SERIAL=/dev/serialForLeftHalf
make BOARD=do52pro RIGHT_HALF=1 du-flash SERIAL=/dev/serialForLeftHalf

Here are some images to compare the three variants, from AliExpress (various stores have the images so don’t know where the original is).

• Keyboard