Flashing a nice!nano controller

First use

When connecting a new nice!nano controller to your computer using a USB C cable, it will present itself to your computer as a disk, called NICENANO.

There are two LEDs on the nice!nano. While connected as a disk, the left LED will slowly blink in blue. The right LED will remain off.

You can drag a .UF2 file to the newly mounted disk to it to flash it. You can find such files for your keyboard using our Firmware Finder, or compile them yourself from ZMK firmware.

After flashing

Once flashed with keyboard firmware, connecting the nice!nano to your computer or other host device will cause the nice!nano to show up as a keyboard. For example, as "Kyria".

You should not be seeing the disk attached to your computer anymore. If the NICENANO disk pops right back up, that means the flashing process has failed. Please try it again, and skip to the troubleshooting section of this page if the issue persists.

By default, connecting the nice!nano over USB only supplies it with power. If you open your device's Bluetooth settings, you should be able to see your nice!nano as the keyboard you flashed it with its firmware for. You can then connect to it. It won't ask for a passcode when attempting to pair.

When connecting the nice!nano to power, the right LED will quickly turn on in orange, and will be quick to turn off again too. The left LED will blink in blue as it establishes a connection with your computer.

You can connect a row and a column pad with one another to output a key. You can do so with metal tweezers, a paperclip or a piece of wire. You can look at the bottom of your keyboard (the labels next to the controller footprint, like connecting C0 with R0) or at the schematics for your keyboard to see which pins you can connect.

Mind that not all combinations of rows and columns will output a key. Some combinations won't be connected in the firmware, and some combinations are connected but are mapped to a modifier or layer key. Just try a few combinations (and be sure to have your cursor's focus on a text field on your computer). Any character output means that it's good to go!

Flashing

If you want to flash your nice!nano again while it's not yet soldered, you need to short the RST and GND pins twice quickly with tweezers, a paperclip or something similarly conductive. It will present itself to your computer as a disk, called NICENANO, after which you can drag another .UF2 file to it. Easy as that!

Once soldered to your keyboard, you can double-tap the keyboard's reset button instead.

Troubleshooting

If you're running into issues along the way, the first thing to do so is flashing a reset file, which you can download using our Firmware Finder. You can then try to pair again.

If that doesn't work, please have a look at the nice!nano troubleshooting documentation.

You can also have a look at the ZMK Flashing Issues and ZMK Connection Issues pages over at the ZMK documentation.