Introduction
In my opinion, ELECOM TK-FBP018 is one of the best portable bluetooth keyboards available on the market today. As you can see, the keyboard layout is quite different from the default US English keyboard. This note presents the Android key layout for this keyboard written by me.
Layout description
The keyboard layout is represented on this image. It offers two
key maps: English and Russian . The English key map is colored in black.
It's almost
identical to the key map printed on the keyboard. The Russian key map is colored
in green. The Caps lock toggles between the two key maps.
If you want to adapt the key map for some other language, just replace the
capslock and capslock+shift mappings with desired unicode codes in the
kcm-file.
How to install
Just copy the key character file Vendor_056e_Product_1018.kl to
/system/usr/keylayout/ and the key layout file
Vendor_056e_Product_1018.kcm to /system/usr/keychars/.
You need to have root access to do this. Also make sure that permissions to
these files are 0644 and the owner is root:root.
In case of any troubles with the layout (for example, when it doesn't seem to be
loaded when you connect the keyboard), see the system log using the logcat
command.
Useful links
- Key Layout Files from official Android documentation.
- Key Character Map Files from official Android documentation.
- Tutorial: A custom android layout for logitech tablet keyboard - a very detailed instruction for creating custom key maps for Android.
Update from 17 Jan 2015
After few weeks of usage, I decided to modify the keyboard kayout in order to make it as close to the ordinary qwerty-layout as possible. This image repesents the result. The corresponding keyboard layout files are here: kcm, kl.
