I find that having a way to check the battery and connection status is very useful with wireless devices. Traditionally, the way to do this is through the addition of a display. However I always thought displays were a bit overkill for that and once I started using Xiao BLE controllers I noticed that they have an RGB LED built onto the controller itself that can be programmed.

So I wrote a small tool to indicate the battery and BT profile status that uses that LED, and I thought I'd share more broadly in case it is useful to others. It's pretty easy to add to your ZMK build as documented in the README as it is a ZMK module.

While it supports Seeeduino Xiao BLE out of the box, it's also easy to add support for it if you have a custom keyboard that has three dumb LEDs for RGB colors.

ZMK community spotlight series continues with a third installment -- and this one is a twofer! ZMK contributor Joel Spading wrote about ZMK Tools, a handy Visual Studio Code extension to ease working with ZMK configurations, and ZMK Locale Generator, a tool to help users that use non-US English keyboard locales in their operating systems.

The second post of our community spotlight series is now up! This time we are highlighting the zmk-nodefree-config project by urob, which provides handy utilities for working with ZMK devicetree keymaps.

Also check out the first post in the series by Nick Coutsos at https://zmk.dev/blog/2023/11/09/keymap-editor if you haven't done so yet, especially if you prefer a more graphical approach to editing your ZMK keymaps.

We are starting a new series of "community spotlight" posts, where we highlight interesting and useful projects in the ZMK ecosystem. The first post is penned by Nick Coutsos, talking about the Keymap Editor project which lets you edit your ZMK keymaps with a graphical interface.